Jesse Jackson Passed Away!

The fight continues. Jesse Jackson, Sr. we will continue your fight for justice and equality.

Midway Wrap Up in May.

Jesse Jackson, Sr. the civil rights leader, ordain minister, 1984 and 1988 Democratic presidential candidate and media personality has passed away at the age of 84.

President Donald J. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Gov. JB Pritzker, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL), former presidents Barack Obama (with Michelle Obama), Joe Biden (with Dr. Jill Biden), George W. Bush (with Laura Bush), Bill Clinton (with Hillary Clinton), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and members of Congress will react to his passing.

Jonathan Jackson, one of the youngest sons is currently a member of the House of Representatives. His brother Jesse, Jr. was previously a member.

Okay, news broke overnight that Jesse, Sr. has succumbed to Parkinson’s disease and early onset dementia.

Jackson was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease before doctors confirmed last year that he had PSP, a rare brain disorder that affects movement, balance, and cognition.

Legends. Jesse Jackson made Michael Jackson a supporter of Palestine.

He was a flawed man but a man who fought for a purpose.

As a young organizer in Chicago, Jackson was called to meet with King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis shortly before King was killed and he publicly positioned himself thereafter as King’s successor.

Jackson led a lifetime of crusades in the United States and abroad, advocating for the poor and underrepresented on issues from voting rights and job opportunities to education and health care. He scored diplomatic victories with world leaders, and through his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, he channeled cries for Black pride and self-determination into corporate boardrooms, pressuring executives to make America a more open and equitable society.

In 1968, he was in Memphis alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when a white nationalist assassinated him as he left the Lorraine Motel. He is a young protégé to the civil rights leader. 

Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL) and his father.

King was vilified by the far right as a racial meddler and vowed to silence his tongue.

Jackson founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) and the National Rainbow Coalition were merged to serve one purpose, community action. 

The organizations pursue social justice, civil rights, and political activism.

He was born from a teenage pregnancy and rape by an older man who was married.

Jackson was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on October 8, 1941, to Helen Burns (1924–2015), a 16-year-old high school student, and her 33-year-old married neighbor, Noah Louis Robinson (1908–1997). His ancestry includes Cherokee, enslaved African-Americans, Irish plantation owners, and a Confederate sheriff.

Robinson was a former professional boxer who was an employee of a textile brokerage and a well-known figure in the black community. 

One year after Jesse's birth, his mother married Charles Henry Jackson, a post office maintenance worker who later adopted the boy.

Jesse was given his stepfather's name in the adoption, but as he grew up he also maintained a close relationship with Robinson. He considers both men to be his fathers.

Being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton. This comes at a time when Clinton was facing allegations of affairs. Jackson had numerous affairs. One led to a child.

As a child, Jackson was taunted by other children about his out-of-wedlock birth and has said these experiences helped motivate him to succeed. 

Living under Jim Crow segregation laws, Jackson was taught to go to the back of the bus and use separate water fountains—practices he accepted until the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955.

Jackson attended the racially segregated Sterling High School in Greenville, where he was elected student class president, finished tenth in his class, and earned letters in baseball, football, and basketball.

Jackson ran for president in 1984 and 1988. He ran on Palestinian freedom, ending the war on drugs, Black reparations, indigenous reparations and Hispanic unity.

During the Reagan years, the religious right sought dominance with culture wars and censorship.

They saw Jackson as a threat.

Jackson appearing with George W. Bush. Jackson opposed Bush's wars and the Patriot Act.

Israel definitely saw him as a threat because he fought against apartheid in South Africa and Israel. They used every devious trick to sink his campaigns.

Israel had a healthy relationship with then president Ronald Reagan. They worked with Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater and Roger Stone to create a campaign of racial politics. They used the Jackson campaign to tank Walter Mondale in the Reagan landslide and Michael Dukakis in the George H.W. Bush landslide. The welfare queen and the other guy taking your job scared up white voters. It motivated the South to become a stronghold for Republicans. As of today, Republican governors dominate all but two Southern states.

The far right often scapegoats Black grievances to Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton.

Any issue involving Black Americans shot by police, Blacks being discriminated, Blacks being victims of sexual abuse and Blacks being involved in criminal acts, the far right zeros in on Jackson as their boogeyman to scare up white voters.

Jackson was a shadow delegate. When Washington, DC wanted statehood, the federal district elected Jackson as a U.S. Senator. He was not sworn in but allowed to be on the Senate floor in viewing.

Jackson with Barack Obama. Jesse Jackson had a testy relationship with Obama during his presidential run. He felt Obama betrayed Black America after he cut off Jeremiah Wright during the campaign.

Jackson is married to Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson. They have five children.

Santita (1963), Jesse Jr. (1965), Jonathan Luther (1966), Yusef DuBois (1970), and Jacqueline Lavinia (1975). 

He has a sixth daughter from an affair. 

Jackson had had an affair with a staffer, Karin Stanford, which resulted in the birth of a daughter, Ashley, in May 1999. According to CNN, in August 1999 the Rainbow Push Coalition paid Stanford $15,000 (equivalent to $28,310 in 2024) in moving expenses and $21,000 (equivalent to $39,640 in 2024) for contracting work. A promised advance of an additional $40,000 against future contracting work was rescinded once the affair became public. This incident prompted Jackson to withdraw from activism for a short period. He was paying $4,000 a month in child support as of 2001. 

CNN suspended, and later canceled, Both Sides with Jesse Jackson.

And when he declared, “I am Somebody,” in a poem he often repeated, he sought to reach people of all colors. “I may be poor, but I am Somebody; I may be young; but I am Somebody; I may be on welfare, but I am Somebody,” Jackson intoned.

Jackson with Joe Biden.

It was a message he took literally and personally, having risen from obscurity in the segregated South to become America’s best-known civil rights activist since King.

Progressive agitator Santita Jackson confirmed that her father died at home in Chicago, surrounded by family.

“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.”

Fellow civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton called his mentor “a consequential and transformative leader who changed this nation and the world.”

“He kept the dream alive and taught young children from broken homes, like me, that we don’t have broken spirits,” Sharpton wrote on Facebook. “A giant has gone home.”

Despite profound health challenges in his final years including a rare neurological disorder that affected his ability to move and speak, Jackson continued protesting against racial injustice into the era of Black Lives Matter. In 2024, he appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and at a City Council meeting to show support for a resolution backing a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.

“Even if we win,” he told marchers in Minneapolis before the officer whose knee kept George Floyd from breathing was convicted of murder, “it’s relief, not victory. They’re still killing our people. Stop the violence, save the children. Keep hope alive.”

Calls to action, delivered in a memorable voice

Jackson’s voice, infused with the stirring cadences and powerful insistence of the Black church, demanded attention. On the campaign trail and elsewhere, he used rhyming and slogans such as: “Hope not dope” and “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it then I can achieve it,″ to deliver his messages.

Donald J. Trump, then a prominent figure in the 1980s with Jackson. As president, Trump has done policies detrimental to Jackson's vision of America.

Jackson had his share of critics, both within and outside of the Black community. Some considered him a grandstander, too eager to seek out the spotlight. Looking back on his life and legacy, Jackson told The Associated Press in 2011 that he felt blessed to be able to continue the service of other leaders before him and to lay a foundation for those to come.

“A part of our life’s work was to tear down walls and build bridges, and in a half century of work, we’ve basically torn down walls,” Jackson said. “Sometimes when you tear down walls, you’re scarred by falling debris, but your mission is to open up holes so others behind you can run through.”

In his final months, as he received 24-hour care, he lost his ability to speak, communicating with family and visitors by holding their hands and squeezing.

“I get very emotional knowing that these speeches belong to the ages now,” his son, Jesse Jackson Jr., told the AP in October.

Presidential aspirations fall short but help ‘keep hope alive’

Despite once telling a Black audience he would not run for president “because white people are incapable of appreciating me,” Jackson ran twice and did better than any Black politician had before President Barack Obama, winning 13 primaries and caucuses for the Democratic nomination in 1988, four years after his first failed attempt.

His successes left supporters chanting another Jackson slogan, “Keep Hope Alive.”

“I was able to run for the presidency twice and redefine what was possible; it raised the lid for women and other people of color,” he told the AP. “Part of my job was to sow seeds of the possibilities.”

U.S. Rep. John Lewis said during a 1988 C-SPAN interview that Jackson’s two runs for the Democratic nomination “opened some doors that some minority person will be able to walk through and become president.”

Jackson in 2025 in his final Selma walk. 

Jackson also pushed for cultural change, joining calls by NAACP members and other movement leaders in the late 1980s to identify Black people in the United States as African Americans.

“To be called African Americans has cultural integrity — it puts us in our proper historical context,” Jackson said at the time. “Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some base, some historical cultural base. African Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity.”

Jackson’s words sometimes got him in trouble.

In 1984, he apologized for what he thought were private comments to a reporter, calling New York City “Hymietown,” a derogatory reference to its large Jewish population. And in 2008, he made headlines when he complained that Obama was “talking down to Black people” in comments captured by a microphone he didn’t know was on during a break in a television taping.

Pro Israeli groups hated Jackson. He supported Palestinian freedom. That's why they wanted to sink his presidential bids.

Still, when Jackson joined the jubilant crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park to greet Obama that election night, he had tears streaming down his face.

“I wish for a moment that Dr. King or (slain civil rights leader) Medgar Evers ... could’ve just been there for 30 seconds to see the fruits of their labor,” he told the AP years later. “I became overwhelmed. It was the joy and the journey.”

Exerting influence on events at home and abroad

Jackson also had influence abroad, meeting world leaders and scoring diplomatic victories, including the release of Navy Lt. Robert Goodman from Syria in 1984, as well as the 1990 release of more than 700 foreign women and children held after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In 1999, he won the freedom of three Americans imprisoned by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.

“Citizens have the right to do something or do nothing,” Jackson said, before heading to Syria. “We choose to do something.”

Thank you Rev. Jackson.

In 2021, Jackson joined the parents of Ahmaud Arbery inside the Georgia courtroom where three white men were convicted of killing the young Black jogger. In 2022, he hand-delivered a letter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago, calling for federal charges against former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke in the 2014 killing of Black teenager Laquan McDonald.

Jackson, who stepped down as president of Rainbow/PUSH in July 2023, disclosed in 2017 that he had sought treatment for Parkinson’s, but he continued to make public appearances even as the disease made it more difficult for listeners to understand him. Earlier this year doctors confirmed a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a life-threatening neurological disorder. He was admitted to a hospital in November.

During the coronavirus pandemic, he and his wife survived being hospitalized with COVID-19. Jackson was vaccinated early, urging Black people in particular to get protected, given their higher risks for bad outcomes.

“It’s America’s unfinished business — we’re free, but not equal,” Jackson told the AP. “There’s a reality check that has been brought by the coronavirus, that exposes the weakness and the opportunity.”