The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the protégé of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and founder of Operation PUSH who ran inspiring but unsuccessful campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, died Tuesday at age 84.
He died at home, surrounded by family, the Associated Press reported, citing his daughter. “Our father was a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in a statement posted online. “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family. His unwavering belief in justice, equality, and love uplifted millions, and we ask you to honor his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by.”
Jackson had serious health challenges in his final years — including a rare brain disorder that affected his ability to move and speak, AP reported — but continued protesting racial injustice into the era of Black Lives Matter.
Earlier in his career, Jackson played a significant role in persuading Americans who identified as “Black” to embrace the identifier “African American.”
He was not the preferred candidate of the Democratic political establishment — Black or white — but his focus on voting registration and grassroots outreach led to two electrifying underdog campaigns for president.
A powerful orator whose trademark call-and-response phrases — such as “I Am Somebody!” and “Keep hope alive!” and “What time is it?! It’s Nation time!” — Jackson boosted the self-esteem and political activism of his mostly Black audiences. He was not the preferred candidate of the Democratic political establishment — Black or white — but his focus on voter registration and grassroots outreach led to two electrifying underdog campaigns for president. He won more than 3 million votes in 1984 and nearly 7 million in 1988.
“My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised,” Jackson said in a speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. After Democrat Walter Mondale lost to President Ronald Reagan that year in a landslide, Jackson formalized his campaign’s outreach and political apparatus into the National Rainbow Coalition. He came up short to Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988. He continued his political outreach after his presidential runs, merging Operation PUSH and the National Rainbow Coalition into the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in 1996.
Born Jesse Louis Burns on Oct. 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson — who excelled at school and sports — won a football scholarship to the University of Illinois, where he encountered resistance to the idea of a Black man playing quarterback and soon left. He transferred to North Carolina A&T College in 1961, arriving on the Greensboro campus the year after four students embarked upon a new protest strategy by sitting in at Woolworth’s lunch counter. Soon after, Jackson was leading civil rights protests in Greensboro himself.
Jackson entered the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1964, but the following year — motivated by the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation against civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama — he drove south to assist the work the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were doing to secure voting rights for Black Americans. There, Jackson met King and approached SCLC leadership about organizing for the SCLC in Chicago. In 1966, at age 24, Jackson became the leader of the SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket, an economic program organized through Black churches that tailored boycotts to pressure businesses to acquiesce to community demands for job opportunities and outreach.
Displaying the temerity that would become a hallmark of his political career, Jackson wrote in a 1962 letter to King, who had taken on one of his most difficult campaigns: “I don’t think you’ll ever bring God to Albany, Georgia. … Best of luck, though.”
On April 4, 1968, Jackson was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, when King was assassinated.
He later clashed with the SCLC and resigned from the organization in 1971. Undeterred and unfazed, Jackson quickly founded Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) on Christmas Day 1971 as an extension of the work he had started under Operation Breadbasket. The group’s philosophy changed as Jackson started to see the need for a Marshall Plan for Black Americans — one focused on community investment and partnerships with corporations, banks and private firms that would provide resources for Black businesses and communities. Washington Post columnist William Raspberry summarized this approach in 1982: “His latest notion is that corporate America must be induced to treat black America as it treats any other underdeveloped nation in which it wants to do business: that is, to engage in aid as well as trade.”
In considering Jackson’s runs for president, historian Robert Greene II, who is writing a book on Black Americans’ role in politics from 1964 to 2000, told me Jackson should be remembered for “his ability to carry on a version of the Black organizing tradition in the context of Reagan’s America,” which served as a rejection of the nation’s conservative “retrenchment.”
Bringing the phrase “African American” into the mainstream was also a significant part of his legacy. At a December 1988 news conference in Chicago, he told reporters, “Just as we were called Colored, but were not that, and then Negro, but not that, to be called Black is just as baseless.” He said that the term African American “has cultural integrity” and “puts us in our proper historical context.” The term was adopted by 75 Black national leaders the following year.
In the wake of his passing, Jackson’s oft-repeated instruction to “keep hope alive” is even more important, as is his emphasis on unity. As Greene told me before Jackson died: “The future of the Rainbow Coalition could very well determine the overall future of American politics. If such a coalition can be formed once more and kept stable for a generation, it would be the best and most reliable bulwark against the kind of conservatism Donald Trump and the modern Republican Party represent.”
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