{"id":430797,"date":"2026-02-17T18:05:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T18:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/430797\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T18:05:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T18:05:08","slug":"jesse-jackson-obituary-jesse-jackson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/430797\/","title":{"rendered":"Jesse Jackson obituary | Jesse Jackson"},"content":{"rendered":"

The veteran civil rights activist Jesse Jackson<\/a>, who has died aged 84, made history when he stood for the White House in 1984 and 1988. He was not the first African American to seek the US presidency, but he was the first to mount a serious challenge, breaking through racial barriers, securing millions of votes and, at one point, becoming frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.<\/p>\n

His run opened the way for Barack Obama<\/a> two decades later. But Jackson deserves to be remembered as more than a footnote in Obama\u2019s biography. It took courage and self-confidence to stand in the 1980s, with memories of segregation and the civil rights battles of the 60s still raw.<\/p>\n

In the middle of the 1984 presidential run, the writer James Baldwin<\/a> offered what today still stands as a fitting epitaph. The writer told reporters that the presence of an African-American civil rights activist in the race had been a significant moment.<\/p>\n

Jackson\u2019s presence \u201cpresents the American Republic with questions and choices it has spent all its history until this hour trying to avoid … And nothing will ever again be what it was before.\u201d The quote came from Marshall Frady<\/a>\u2019s sympathetic biography, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson, published in 1996.<\/p>\n

Jesse Jackson and Nelson Mandela in South Africa, 2005. Photograph: Jon Hrusa\/EPA<\/p>\n

Jackson felt he never fully received the credit he deserved for his various achievements. He was partly to blame. He alienated people who might otherwise have been drawn to him.<\/p>\n

For all his virtues, he could be vain, verbose and prone to exaggeration. His reputation was damaged \u2013 and never fully recovered \u2013 from embellishments and erratic behaviour in the aftermath of Martin Luther King<\/a>\u2019s assassination in 1968. The irony is that there was no need for him to exaggerate his role in that tragedy or any other part of his life story. He had a good story to tell.<\/p>\n

He was born Jesse Burns into the segregated south, in Greenville, South Carolina<\/a>. His mother, Helen Burns, a teenager at the time, had been hoping to make a career as a singer, an ambition abandoned when Jesse was born. She worked instead in a cosmetics shop. Jesse\u2019s father was Noah Robinson, a former boxer and married man.<\/p>\n

Two years later, Helen married Charles Jackson, with Jesse taking his surname when he was 15. The family lived in a shack in one of the poorest districts of Greenville. It was a tough childhood, but he felt a need to embellish it, saying he had been so poor he had to steal food to survive, a claim disputed by those he grew up with. He faced abuse because of his colour but also from classmates, who taunted him as a \u201cbastard\u201d. Those close to him said the taunts drove him to prove himself.<\/p>\n

His grandmother, Tibby, encouraged a sense of self-belief. A domestic servant who could not read, she memorised the titles of books he needed and borrowed them from the relatively well off houses where she worked.<\/p>\n

Jesse excelled at school and went on to win an athletics scholarship in 1959 to the mainly white University of Illinois. He lasted only a year, blaming racial prejudice for his failure to make it into the first team. The alternate version is he had not been talented enough and his academic performance had been poor.<\/p>\n

Then he transferred to the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, based in Greensboro. He was hanging around with other football players when Jackie (Jacqueline) Brown, a fellow student, passed by. He told her that he would marry her one day and he did, in 1962. He graduated in 1964 with a degree in sociology, and two years later they moved to Chicago<\/a>, which was to become his power base. He studied at the Chicago Theological Seminary and became a Baptist minister in 1968.<\/p>\n

Jackson\u2019s civil rights activity had begun in January 1960. He was at home in Greenville and needed a book for a university assignment. It was not available in the small \u201ccoloureds-only\u201d library and he was denied access to the \u201cwhites-only\u201d one. He vowed to return in the summer and on 16 July led seven others into the library<\/a>, sat down and began reading newspapers and books. He was arrested. It was to become a regular occurrence.<\/p>\n

\"JesseJesse Jackson: titan of US civil rights movement leaves legacy of hope – The Latest<\/p>\n

In 1965, he and other students drove to Selma, Alabama<\/a>, to take part in a march for African-American voting rights. An earlier march from Selma had ended in a bloody confrontation with police. He impressed King, who agreed to give him a staff job with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), one of the main driving forces of the civil rights movement.<\/p>\n

Jesse Jackson, left, with Martin Luther King in Chicago, 1966. Photograph: Larry Stoddard\/AP<\/p>\n

The following year, he became head of the Chicago branch of the SCLC\u2019s Operation Breadbasket, set up to help improve the economic situation of African Americans. A year later he became its national director and made it a potent force, organising boycotts of companies engaged in jobs discrimination. King viewed him as a protege, but Jackson\u2019s self-promotion and boasting were resented by others around King and, at times, by King himself.<\/p>\n

Jackson was at the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968 when King was assassinated. Jackson told reporters that he cradled King\u2019s head in his arms as he gasped his last words, a claim rejected by others present. Just as controversial, while King\u2019s aides stayed in Memphis to mourn, he flew to Chicago and, over the next days, gave television interview after interview, wearing a sweater smeared with King\u2019s blood.<\/p>\n

Don Rose, a Chicago journalist and civil rights activist who accompanied Jackson to the interviews, later told a PBS Frontline documentary<\/a> about Jackson he was \u201cthinking ahead, thinking of, frankly, his own career, the future of the movement and his role within it\u201d. His undisguised ambition angered those close to King, including his widow Coretta<\/a>, who refused to speak to Jackson for years afterwards. Jackson, asked later about his behaviour, offered vague answers, saying he had been traumatised.<\/p>\n

King was replaced by one of his closest friends, Ralph Abernathy. He and Jackson clashed repeatedly until 1971, when Jackson resigned from the SCLC<\/a> to form his own organisation. Similar in aim to Operation Breadbasket, he gave it the grandiose name People United to Save Humanity (Push), later changed to People United to Serve Humanity<\/a>. He established another organisation in 1984 to support equal rights for African Americans, women, gay people and others, the National Rainbow Coalition, later merged with Push<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Always restless, he travelled abroad, including visits in 1979 to South Africa<\/a> to show solidarity with anti-apartheid campaigners and to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank, where he called for the creation of a Palestinian state.<\/p>\n

In October 1983 he entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. His wife Jackie told Frontline that he had a habit of making his most important announcements while putting on his socks. He told her: \u201cJackie, I\u2019m going to run for president of these United States of America.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was not the first African American to seek the nomination. That accolade belongs to the Democratic congresswoman Shirley Chisholm<\/a> in 1972. She did not get far, hampered by party establishment hostility towards a female candidate.<\/p>\n

Jesse Jackson in 2021. Photograph: Allison Bailey\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

Jackson started as an outsider, with little financial backing. He raised his national profile with an unusual mission, to Syria, in December 1983 to negotiate the release of an American pilot<\/a> shot down over Lebanon.<\/p>\n

One of his strengths lay in his ability to deliver rousing speeches in the inspirational rhetorical style of southern preachers such as King. He stood out from his rivals too by promoting one of the most radical platforms since Franklin D Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal: rebuilding infrastructure, full employment, higher taxes for the wealthy, and reform of healthcare and welfare.<\/p>\n

His advocacy of a Palestinian state cost him the votes of Jewish Democrats who viewed him as anti-Israel. He lost more Jewish votes in February 1984, when he referred, in what he had assumed was an off-the-record conversation, to Jews as Hymies and New York City as Hymietown. He insisted the language was not antisemitic, just \u201cnon-insulting colloquial language\u201d.<\/p>\n

He came in a respectable third in the primaries, with 18% of the popular vote, behind Walter Mondale<\/a> and Gary Hart. He was to do better in 1988. His biographer Frady recalled a poignant moment Jackson knew he had reached across racial barriers. He was revisiting one of the landmarks of the civil rights movement, Selma, when he came across group of white youths. They were shouting support.<\/p>\n

He ran into trouble in New York, whose Democratic mayor Ed Koch<\/a> castigated him for lying in the aftermath of King\u2019s assassination and using his death to try to further his own ambitions. He emerged from the contest, in which he had been briefly favourite, in second place on 29%, behind Michael Dukakis on 42% and ahead of Al Gore<\/a> on 13%.<\/p>\n

The rest of his life was spent trying, unsuccessfully, to find a role that would match the excitement of the civil rights years and the presidential runs. During the first Gulf war, he flew to Baghdad to negotiate successfully with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein<\/a> the release hundreds of Americans and other nationalities.<\/p>\n

In 1999, he persuaded Serbia to release three downed US pilots. Bill Clinton<\/a>, as president, appointed him special envoy to Africa and in 2000 awarded him the presidential medal of freedom, the highest civilian award in the US. He acted as spiritual adviser to Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky<\/a> affair.<\/p>\n

Jackson had personal problems of his own. In 2001, pre-empting publication in the National Enquirer, he confirmed he had had a four-year affair<\/a> with one of his staff, a political scientist, Karin Stanford, who became pregnant in 1998. He did not leave his wife but promised to support the child.<\/p>\n

He was one of the main speakers in London at the 2003 anti-Iraq invasion protest<\/a>, one of the biggest ever in the UK.<\/p>\n

Although he continued to turn up at protests across the US and around the world, Jackson appeared increasingly out of touch with a new generation of activists such as the Black Lives Matter<\/a> campaign against the shooting of unarmed African Americans.<\/p>\n

In 2013, he suffered what a family friend described as a \u201cgut-wrenching\u201d experience when his son, Jesse Jackson Jr, a Congressman, was sentenced to jail<\/a> for 30 months for spending $750,000 in campaign funds on personal items.<\/p>\n

He supported Obama in his run for the presidency but not uncritically. After Obama took issue with African-American fathers who failed to support their children, Jackson was caught on microphone accusing him of talking down to African Americans. \u201cI want to cut his nuts off<\/a>,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He was among the crowd at Obama\u2019s victory rally in Chicago and was caught on camera in tears. Asked later<\/a> why Obama had succeeded where he had failed. Jackson described Obama as brilliant but said it was also about timing: \u201cI would say he ran the last lap of a 60-year-race.\u201d<\/p>\n

He announced in 2017<\/a> he had been diagnosed with Parkinson\u2019s disease; and later with progressive supranuclear palsy.<\/p>\n

He is survived by Jackie and their five children, Santita, Jesse Jr, Jonathan, Yusef and Jacqueline, and by the daughter, Ashley, from his relationship with Stanford.<\/p>\n

Jesse Louis Jackson, civil rights activist, minister and politician, born 8 October 1941; died 17 February 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The veteran civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, who has died aged 84, made history when he stood for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":430798,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-430797","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430797\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}