Jesse Jackson died yesterday, his family said. He was 84. Photo / AFP
Veteran US civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson, one of the United States’ most influential black voices, has died, his family has said.
He was 84.
Jackson, a Baptist minister, had been a civil rights leader since the 1960s, when he marched with Martin Luther King jnr and helped fundraise for the cause.
“Our father was a servant leader – not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” Jackson’s family said.
“His unwavering belief in justice, equality and love uplifted millions, and we ask you to honour his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by.”
The family did not release a cause of death, but Jackson revealed in 2017 that he had the degenerative neurological disease Parkinson’s.
He was hospitalised for observation in November in connection to another neurodegenerative condition, according to media reports.
A dynamic orator and a successful mediator in international disputes, Jackson expanded the space for African Americans on the national stage for more than six decades.
He was the most prominent black person to run for the US presidency – with two unsuccessful attempts to capture the Democratic Party nomination in the 1980s – until Barack Obama took the office in 2009.
President Donald Trump praised Jackson as an engaging, gregarious and street-smart man and claimed credit for helping him both before and after becoming president as Jackson fought to empower black Americans.
“Jesse was a force of nature like few others before him,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Trump has a checkered record on race relations. He told the New York Times last month that because of civil rights era protections “white people were treated very badly”.
Trump insists whites in South Africa are victims of genocide and his administration regularly emphasises its focus on people with white European roots. Last week, Trump refused to apologise over a video posted to his social media account that depicted the Obamas as monkeys.
Kamala Harris, the first black Vice-President and loser of the 2024 election to Trump, hailed Jackson as “one of America’s greatest patriots”.
Her former boss, ex-president Joe Biden, said Jackson “believed in his bones” in the idea that all people are created equal and deserve to be treated as such.
Biden remembered Jackson as “determined and tenacious. Unafraid of the work to redeem the soul of our nation.”
Jackson was present for many consequential moments in the long battle for racial justice in the United States, including with King in Memphis in 1968 when the civil rights leader was slain.
He openly wept in the crowd as Obama celebrated his 2008 presidential election, and he stood with George Floyd’s family in 2021 after a court convicted a police officer of the unarmed black man’s murder during an arrest.
Jackson was born Jesse Louis Burns on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, to an unwed teen mother and a former professional boxer.
He later adopted the last name of his stepfather, Charles Jackson.
“I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had a shovel programmed for my hands,” he once said.
He excelled in his segregated high school and earned a football scholarship to the University of Illinois, but later transferred to the predominantly black Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, where he received a degree in sociology.
In 1960, he participated in his first sit-in, in Greenville, and then joined the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights marches in 1965, where he caught King’s attention.
Jackson later emerged as a mediator and envoy on several notable international fronts.
He became a prominent advocate for ending apartheid in South Africa, and in the 1990s served as presidential special envoy for Africa for Bill Clinton.
Missions to free US prisoners took him to Syria, Iraq and Serbia.
He founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a Chicago-based nonprofit organisation focused on social justice and political activisim, in 1996
He is survived by his wife and six children.
- Agence France-Presse