Jesse Jackson, civil rights leader who helped launch progressive movement, dies at 84

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a civil rights leader who bridged the era of Martin Luther King Jr. with the modern world and whose two presidential bids in the 1980s laid the foundation for today’s progressive movement, died early Tuesday, his family announced. He was 84 years old.

“Our father was a servant leader, not only for our family, but also for the oppressed, the voiceless and the ignored around the world,” the family said in a statement. “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 encouraged millions, and we ask that you honor his memory by continuing to fight for the values ​​he lived by.”

The statement did not mention the cause of death, but noted that Jackson died peacefully surrounded by his family.

Jackson was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2013. His diagnosis changed to progressive supranuclear palsy, a neurodegenerative disorder, in April 2025, his Rainbow Coalition/PUSH organization said.

He was hospitalized in November for about two weeks and then also received care in an intensive care facility for his condition.

The Rev. Al Sharpton paid tribute to Jackson in a statement reported by NBC News, writing that “our nation has lost one of its greatest moral voices.”

“Reverend Jackson was where dignity was under attack, from apartheid abroad to injustice at home. His voice echoed in boardrooms and jail cells. His presence changed rooms. His faith never wavered,” Sharpton wrote.

Born in segregated Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson was a prodigy who would become nationally known in his 20s, become a controversial figure in both white and black America in his 30s, help resolve international crises in his 40s, host a CNN show and become a presidential confidant in his 50s, and become a respected elder statesman in the new millennium.

An electrifying speaker, Jackson could never escape criticism that he was more flash than delivery. Other politicians, even ideological allies, considered him untrustworthy and motivated by his ego. Conservatives argued that Jackson added fuel to the fire of racial divisions for his own benefit.

Electoral success eluded him: his only successful campaign was for a totally symbolic position in Washington, DC. But his presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 helped create the image of what the modern Democratic Party seeks to be but rarely seems to achieve: a multiracial coalition of voters dedicated to economic justice.

“In my opinion, if there had been no Jesse Jackson, there would never have been a President Barack Obama,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in 2020 while campaigning alongside Jackson, a man he has repeatedly cited as an inspiration. Yet Jackson, who campaigned as a staunch economic progressive and critic of American foreign policy, also set the stage for Sanders’ own runs for president.

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Jackson was the son of a single teenage mother who grew up across the street from his father’s legitimate family, a rejection that friends told reporters still persisted decades later. He became class president and a star athlete in high school, and later played college football at the University of Illinois and North Carolina A&T. He graduated from the latter school in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, and also served as class president there.

After participating in a sit-in at a public library in Greenville while in college, he moved to Chicago to attend divinity school and become more involved in the Civil Rights Movement. He participated in marches from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama and established a branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by King in Chicago. He was later appointed to lead SCLC’s economic arm, Operation Breadbasket, which organized boycotts of businesses the organization believed did not promote economic opportunities for African Americans.

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Jackson’s obvious ambition and drive impressed and occasionally annoyed King, but irritated other civil rights leaders. His actions following King’s assassination in 1968 would cause a permanent divide between him and King’s family. Jackson, who was standing below the balcony where King was shot, appeared on television the next day wearing a shirt stained with King’s blood. Other SCLC leaders were dismayed, and Coretta Scott King never forgave Jackson.

In 1971, Ralph Abernathy and others ousted Jackson from SCLC leadership, even though he argued that he was simply continuing King’s desire to focus on economic justice.

Jackson, in a 2008 interview with CNN, defended his actions after King’s death as those of a traumatized young man: “If I made mistakes in those hours, they were mistakes of pain, not ambition.”

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Jackson founded PUSH, or People United to Serve Humanity, which led or threatened high-profile boycotts of companies such as McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch, Sears, and Japanese automakers. He called on companies to hire more Black employees, invest more in Black communities and businesses, and advertise more in Black-owned media.

“The new frontier of civil rights is economic: money rights,” Jackson said in a speech in 1984. “If we can spend a trillion dollars a year as consumers, we should have something to show for it besides income.”

Conservatives and business leaders would denounce Jackson as little more than a shakedown artist, arguing that the commitments he obtained from companies seeking to avoid or end boycotts benefited his political allies more than the black population at large.

He also became a somewhat unlikely negotiator for the United States in dealing with left-wing authoritarian governments around the world: he negotiated with Syrian President Hafez al-Assad in 1983 to secure the release of an American pilot shot down over Lebanon, and with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro the following year for the release of 22 Americans held there.

These episodes of international statesmanship helped set the stage for Jackson’s presidential bids in 1984 and 1988. Made during the administration of President Ronald Reagan (the ultimate power of the conservative movement), Jackson’s candidacy, especially his second, would form the foundation of the modern progressive movement, the first signs of progressive dissent from neoliberalism. He challenged the so-called “Atari Democrats,” young, moderate politicians such as Colorado Senator Gary Hart, then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.

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Jackson tried to escape the idea that he was a candidate specifically for black voters and began to transform himself into an economic populist. He won over the Alabama state legislature, whose members included former members of the National Guard who stared at him like a protester, with a speech criticizing “Honda and Toyota, Suzuki and Yamaha, Sony and Panasonic, dumping themselves on the docks and replacing Buick and Chrysler in the American market.”

He turned the small lily-white town of Greenfield, Iowa, population about 2,200 in 1980, into a statewide campaign headquarters, winning over farmers with his knowledge of agricultural economics.

He wanted to double the federal budget for education, backed a version of what we now call “Medicare for All,” and proposed the creation of a national infrastructure bank, tax increases on the wealthy, and a freeze on military spending. He denounced the Reagan administration’s wars in Central America and its close relationship with apartheid South Africa. He campaigned on Native American reservations and reached out to gay and lesbian voters.

“Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow (red, yellow, brown, black and white) and we are all precious in the eyes of God,” he said in a speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, adding: “We must abandon the racial battlefields and come to common economic ground and a higher moral ground. America, our time has come.”

In the first campaign he was treated mainly as a nuisance. His dream of an alliance between progressive blacks and whites seemed foolhardy. But after winning 18% of the vote, including more than four-fifths of the black vote, he began his second campaign in 1988 as a threat.

His outreach to working-class whites increased. White economic populists like Jim Hightower of Texas endorsed him, and he got three times as many white votes as he did in 1984. “A lot of them are real rednecks,” he joked of his new supporters. He garnered nearly 30% of the vote and won 13 primaries or caucuses, essentially sweeping the Deep South. He took the race to the convention and came up short to Dukakis.

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Writing in Time magazine after the election, historian Garry Willis said that Dukakis’ loss was largely due to his decision to keep Jackson and the liberal populism he represented at arm’s length: “Dukakis treated Jackson as an embarrassment, something he had to deal with, placate, keep at a healthy distance. This would lead to his worst mistake, the renunciation of ideology, the attempt to build a middle electorate from scratch in the name of ‘competition.’ In fact, “it fled its foundation rather than building on it.”

For all his progressive bona fides, Jackson was a minister with a clear social conservative streak. He opposed abortion rights at the beginning of his political career, calling abortion “the fundamental human rights issue.” He lamented teenage pregnancy and “babies making babies.” He lectured teenagers about the evils of drug use, supported the death penalty for drug dealers and was in favor of putting more police on the streets.

“If we don’t set moral standards for our children, the drug dealer will,” he said at a meeting of black ministers in 1988.

Jackson’s campaigns registered black voters in droves, whom party operatives credited with helping Democrats win control of the Senate in 1986. They also served as an incubator for a group of black women who would play important roles in Democratic politics, including Donna Brazile, the Rev. Leah Daughtry, and Minyon Moore.

Throughout the 1980s in particular, Jackson battled accusations of anti-Semitism after he referred to New York City as “hymietown” when speaking to a Washington Post reporter, for which he would later apologize. He also refused to distance himself from Louis Farrakhan, a Chicago-based black political and religious leader with a long history of anti-Semitic comments.

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In the 1990s, Jackson’s fame led him to host a debate show on CNN, titled “Both Sides with Jesse Jackson.” Most episodes featured two experts or politicians debating a topic, with Jackson primarily acting as a moderator and often making an editorial comment at the end of an episode.

He also won his only election in 1990, moving to Washington, DC, to become one of the district’s two “shadow senators,” an unpaid job dedicated to lobbying for DC statehood. Local journalists noted that Jackson was not always present in DC, and even missed the first day of the Congressional session in 1991 to address a conference of television executives in Los Angeles. He did not run for re-election in 1996.

In June 1992, Jackson would unknowingly become the host of one of the most famous political maneuvers in history. Clinton, then a front-runner for the Democratic nomination, appeared at a Rainbow Coalition conference and denounced the group for giving a platform to Sister Souljah, a singer and rapper with a history of controversial comments.

The speech seemed designed to embarrass the more liberal Jackson. Years later, he would tell the Washington Post that he made the strategic decision to put the incident behind him.

“I guess the lowest point in the relationship was Sister Souljah’s tactic that was used against us at our conference,” Jackson said during an interview about his relationship with Clinton. “In many ways I was beneath his dignity… I had to accept the personal blow for the greater good.”

After spending much of the 1980s working to defeat the Atari Democrats and the moderate Democratic Leadership Council, Jackson spent the 1990s advising Clinton, the DLC’s biggest success. While he criticized Clinton’s measures to reform welfare, he advised him on other issues and became a spiritual supporter after Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and subsequent impeachment. In 2000, Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In theory, Jackson should have had a smoother relationship with the next Democratic president, Barack Obama. The two shared a hometown in Chicago and belonged to the same circles of politically influential black leaders. Jackson’s eldest daughter was even the maid of honor at Barack and Michelle Obama’s wedding.

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Jackson endorsed Obama’s presidential bid in 2008, although his wife supported then-New York Senator Hillary Clinton. But Jackson’s friends told reporters that the elder clearly believed that Obama did not show him enough deference or give credit to the ways in which his presidential campaigns had paved the way for Obama’s successful career.

These tensions came to light in July 2008, when a hot microphone on News caught Jackson saying he wanted to “cut [Obama’s] “I’m crazy… for talking down to black people” after Obama gave a speech chastising absent black fathers. Jackson quickly apologized for his comments, but never joined Obama’s inner circle like he did with Clinton.

Jackson married Jacqueline Brown in 1962, when the couple were still students at North Carolina A&T. Brown valued her privacy and was a low-profile political wife, once warning reporters not to expose any affairs her husband was having.

“If my husband has committed adultery, you better not tell me and you better not investigate the matter,” she told reporters in 1987. “I’m trying to start a family and I won’t let you destroy it.”

Jackson fathered a child in an extramarital relationship with a Rainbow Coalition/PUSH employee in 1999, and the relationship became public in 2001. The press duly covered the revelations, leading CNN to cancel “Both Sides.”.”

Jackson and Jacqueline had five children: Sanita, Jesse Jr., Jonathan, Yusef and Jacqueline. Jesse Jr. served 17 years in Congress representing Illinois before resigning amid a federal corruption investigation. He ultimately pleaded guilty to mail fraud and served 30 months in prison. Jonathan Jackson won a seat in Congress, also representing Illinois, in 2022.

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By the time the society renewed its focus on social and racial justice in the mid-2010s, Jackson had already ascended to statesmanlike status, and a diagnosis of Parkinson’s (later revealed to be the aforementioned paralysis) became public in 2017.

However, Jackson did not stop his activism. He led a protest march in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police shooting of Michael Brown. He traveled to Minneapolis after George Floyd’s death to pressure the district attorney there to charge the officers involved.

He eventually resigned from the leadership of Rainbow/PUSH in 2023, although he continued to speak out on important issues. He condemned Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks of that year, called the war in Gaza a “massacre” and encouraged student protesters across the United States. And ahead of the 2024 election, he warned that President Donald Trump “wants to take us back to white supremacy.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It was 1968.