The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a leading figure in the civil rights movement who ran twice as the Democratic candidate for president, has died at the age of 84. The news was confirmed in a statement from his family, who noted that Jackson “died peacefully.”
“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 wrote. “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.”
While the family did not specify a cause of death, the news came after Jackson’s hospitalization in November last year for progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), a rare neurodegenerative condition. He was also diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017, and hospitalized twice with COVID in recent years.
Born on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson showed an interest in politics from an early age. He excelled at school, becoming class president and earning a football scholarship to the University of Illinois, though he later transferred to North Carolina A&T, an HBCU where he first became involved with the civil rights movement. (In 1960, he was arrested along with seven other students for a silent demonstration in a library reserved for white students, eventually leading to its desegregation.)
After moving to Chicago and being ordained as a minister, he caught the attention of Martin Luther King Jr., later participating in the Selma to Montgomery marches and being elected by King as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation Breadbasket, dedicated to providing economic opportunities and jobs for Black communities, partly through the use of strategic boycotts.
