The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a leader of the civil rights movement for decades, has died at the age of 84

CHICAGO (AP) — The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a disciple of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate who led the civil rights movement for decades after the revered leader was assassinated, died Tuesday. He was 84 years old.

His daughter, Santita Jackson, confirmed that her father died at home surrounded by his family.

He watches: Abe Phillippe explores Jesse Jackson’s political legacy in ‘A Dream Deferred’

As a young organizer in Chicago, Jackson was summoned to meet with King at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis shortly before King’s murder and subsequently publicly positioned himself as King’s successor.

Jackson led crusades throughout his life in the United States and abroad, championing the poor and underrepresented on issues from voting rights and job opportunities to education and health care. He has scored diplomatic victories with world leaders and, through the Rainbow/PUSH coalition, taken cries for black pride and self-determination to corporate boardrooms and pressured CEOs to make America a more open and equitable society.

When he declared “I am somebody” in a poem he often repeated, he was seeking to reach people of all colors. “I may be poor, but I’m somebody, I may be young, but I’m somebody, I may be living on welfare, but I’m somebody,” Jackson echoed.

It was a message he took literally and personally, having risen from obscurity in the segregated South to become America’s most famous civil rights activist since King.

“Our father was a servant leader, not only of our family, but of the oppressed, the voiceless, and the neglected around the world,” Jackson’s family said in a statement posted online. “We shared it with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family.”

Fellow civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton described his mentor as “a significant and transformative leader who changed this nation and the world.”

“He kept the dream alive and taught young kids from broken families, like me, that we don’t have broken spirits,” Sharpton wrote on Facebook. “The giant has returned home.”

Despite profound health challenges in his final years including a rare neurological disorder that affected his ability to move and speak, Jackson continued to protest against racial injustice in the era of Black Lives Matter. In 2024, he appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and at a city council meeting to show support for a resolution supporting a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas.

“Even if we win, this is a relief, not a victory,” he told marchers in Minneapolis before condemning the officer whose knee prevented George Floyd from breathing. “They are still killing our people. Stop the violence, save the children. Keep hope alive.”

Calls to action, delivered in an unforgettable voice

Reverend Jesse Jackson speaks at a news conference in New York in 1997 to announce an agreement to boycott Mitsubishi Motors products and the company’s workforce diversity efforts. Photography by Mike Segar/Reuters

Jackson’s voice, full of exciting rhythms and the powerful insistence of the black church, demanded attention. On the campaign trail and elsewhere, he used rhyme and slogans such as “Hope not a drug” and “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it” to get his messages across.

Jackson had his share of critics, both within the black community and outside of it. Some considered him shy, too eager to seek the limelight. Looking back on his life and legacy, Jackson told The Associated Press in 2011 that he feels blessed to be able to continue serving other leaders who came before him and lay the foundation for leaders to come.

He watches: Rev. Jesse Jackson’s full speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention

“Part of our life’s work has been to tear down walls and build bridges, and in half a century of work, we’ve basically torn down walls,” Jackson said. “Sometimes when you’re tearing down walls, you’ll get scars from falling debris, but your job is to open holes so others behind you can run through them.”

In his final months, as he received 24-hour care, he lost his ability to speak and communicate with family and visitors by holding and squeezing their hands.

“I feel very emotional knowing that these speeches belong to the ages now,” his son, Jesse Jackson Jr., told the AP in October.

A student athlete is drawn to the civil rights movement

Jesse Lewis Jackson was born on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, the son of high school student Helen Burns and Noah Lewis Robinson, a married man who lived next door. Jackson was later adopted by Charles Henry Jackson who married his mother.

Jackson was a star quarterback on the football team at Sterling High School in Greenville, and accepted a football scholarship to the University of Illinois. But after being told that blacks couldn’t play quarterback, he transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he became the starting quarterback, an honors student in sociology and economics, and student body president.

Arriving at the historically black campus in 1960 a few months after students there staged sit-ins at a whites-only restaurant, Jackson was immersed in the burgeoning civil rights movement.

By 1965, he joined the voting rights march that King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. King sent him to Chicago to launch Operation Breadbasket, an attempt by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to pressure companies to hire black workers.

Jackson described his time with King as “four years of wonderful work.”

Jackson was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was murdered at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. Jackson’s account of the assassination was that King died in his arms.

With a flair for the dramatic, Jackson wore a turtleneck sweater he said was stained with King’s blood for two days, including at Chicago City Hall’s memorial service for King, where he said: “I came here with a heavy heart because I have a blood stain on my chest from Dr. King’s head.”

However, several of King’s aides, including speechwriter Alfred Duckett, wondered whether Jackson might have been tainted by King’s blood on his clothes. There are no images of Jackson in the photographs taken shortly after the assassination.

In 1971, Jackson broke away from the SCLC to form Operation Push, originally called People United to Save Humanity. The organization based on Chicago’s South Side has announced a comprehensive mission, from workforce diversification to voter registration in communities of color across the country. Using lawsuits and threats of boycotts, Jackson pressured major corporations to spend millions and publicly commit to diversifying their workforces.

Constant campaigning often left his wife, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, a college sweetheart whom he married in 1963, to take the lead in raising their five children: Santita Jackson, Yusef DuBois Jackson, Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson Jr., and two future congressmen, U.S. Reps. Jonathan Luther Jackson and Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who resigned in 2012 but are seeking re-election in the 2026 midterms.

The elder Jackson, who was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968 and earned a master’s degree in divinity in 2000, also admitted to fathering a child, Ashley Jackson, with one of his Rainbow/PUSH employees, Karen L. Jackson. Stanford. He said he understood what it meant to be born out of wedlock and supported her emotionally and financially.

Presidential ambitions fall short but help ‘keep hope alive’

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, former presidential candidate, watches President-elect Barack Obama during Obama’s Election Night rally in Chicago in 2008. Photograph by Jason Reed/Reuters

Although he once told a black audience that he would not run for president “because white people can’t appreciate me,” Jackson ran twice and performed better than any black politician before President Barack Obama, winning 13 primaries and a caucus for the Democratic nomination in 1988, four years after his first failed attempt.

His successes left his supporters chanting another Jackson slogan: “Keep Hope Alive.”

“She was able to run for president twice and redefine what was possible; it blew the lid off women and other people of color,” he told the AP. “Part of my job was to plant the seeds of possibility.”

Jackson’s two runs for the Democratic nomination “opened some doors that some member of the minority would be able to walk through and become president,” U.S. Rep. John Lewis said during a 1988 C-SPAN interview.

Jackson also pushed for cultural change, joining calls by NAACP members and other leaders of the movement in the late 1980s to identify blacks in the United States as African Americans.

“Calling us African-American has cultural integrity, it puts us in our proper historical context,” Jackson said at the time. “Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some norm, some historical cultural norm. African Americans have reached this level of cultural maturity.”

Jackson’s words sometimes got him into trouble.

In 1984, he apologized for what he thought were private comments to a reporter, calling New York City “Hymietown,” a derogatory reference to its large Jewish population. In 2008, he made headlines when he complained that Obama was “talking down to black people” in comments captured by a microphone he didn’t know was on during a break in a television taping.

However, when Jackson joined the cheering crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park to greet Obama that election night, tears were streaming down his face.

“I wish for a moment that Dr. King or (slain civil rights leader) Medgar Evers… could have been there for just 30 seconds to see the fruits of their labor,” he told the AP years later. “I was overwhelmed with happiness and the journey.”

Influencing events at home and abroad

Jackson also had influence abroad, meeting with world leaders and achieving diplomatic victories, including the release of Navy Lieutenant Robert Goodman from Syria in 1984, as well as the release of more than 700 foreign women and children in 1990 after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In 1999, he secured the release of three Americans imprisoned by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Jackson said before heading to Syria: “Citizens have the right to do something or not do something.” “We chose to do something.”

In 2021, Jackson joined Ahmaud Arbery’s parents inside the Georgia courtroom where three white men were convicted of killing the young black jogger. In 2022, he hand-delivered a letter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago, calling for federal charges against former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke in the 2014 killing of black teenager Laquan McDonald.

Jackson, who resigned as president of Rainbow/PUSH in July 2023, revealed in 2017 that he had sought treatment for Parkinson’s disease, but continued to make public appearances even when the disease made it difficult for listeners to understand him. Earlier this year, doctors confirmed the diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a life-threatening neurological disorder. He was hospitalized in November.

During the coronavirus pandemic, he and his wife survived being hospitalized with COVID-19. Jackson was vaccinated early, and he urged black people in particular to get protection, given their high risk of poor outcomes.

“It’s America’s unfinished business — we’re free, but we’re not equal,” Jackson told the AP. “There is a reality check brought on by the coronavirus that exposes vulnerability and opportunity.”

Former Associated Press writer Karen Hawkins, who left the AP in 2012, contributed to this report. Associated Press writers Amy Forliti in Minneapolis and Aaron Morrison in New York contributed to this report.