The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader, Baptist minister and two-time presidential candidate, died on the morning of Tuesday, February 17, his family said in a statement. He was 84 years old.
“Our father was a servant leader – not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the family statement said. “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, who graduated from what is now N.C. A&T State University in Greensboro, shared a deep connection throughout his life with North Carolina and its residents’ struggle for civil rights and justice.
A protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson was instrumental in guiding the modern Civil Rights Movement and ran twice for U.S. president, coming in second to Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in the 1988 Democratic primary but choosing party unity over a fight to be the vice presidential nominee.
In 2015, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a chronic neurological disorder that causes difficulties with movement.
“Recognition of the effects of this disease on me has been painful, and I have been slow to grasp the gravity of it,” Jackson wrote after going public with his diagnosis in 2017. “For me, a Parkinson’s diagnosis is not a stop sign but rather a signal that I must make lifestyle changes and dedicate myself to physical therapy in hopes of slowing the disease’s progression.”
Jackson remained active in public life, however, keeping up a regular schedule of speeches, appearances and visits.
In 2021, he joined hundreds of people for a rally outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington to demand federal action on voting rights and an increase in the minimum wage.
Jackson was arrested at the rally, along with the Rev. William J. Barber II of North Carolina and the Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-founders of the National Poor People’s Campaign. Jackson and Barber also were arrested earlier that year after refusing to leave Democratic U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s office in Phoenix.
He was hospitalized with COVID-19 following the Capitol rally, and in November 2021 he hit his head during a fall. But he recovered, serving as president of the Chicago-based Rainbow PUSH Coalition, an international human and civil rights group that he founded, until his retirement in 2023.
Born in South Carolina, educated at NC A&T
Jackson was born in 1941 in Greenville, S.C., and after graduating high school, he spent one year on a football scholarship at the all-white University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before transferring to what was then the N.C. Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro.
There, he met and married his wife Jacqueline while majoring in sociology and becoming a force in Greensboro’s civil rights movement, which started in earnest with the 1960 sit-in at the segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter.
Jackson returned to Greensboro in 2010 to help open the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, established in the old Woolworth building. In 2017, the museum honored him with a Lifetime Civil and Human Rights Award.
The N.C. A&T football quarterback and student body president became a leader in the Congress of Racial Equality and Greensboro’s civil rights movement, marching with hundreds of people in June 1963. He was arrested and charged with inciting to riot, sparking more marches and eventually small steps toward integration.
In 1965, Jackson joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, marching with King and others from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital following the Bloody Sunday march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In 1967, he led an expansion of SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket campaign, which used boycotts and negotiations to get jobs for minorities.
In April 1968, Jackson traveled with King to Memphis for what would be the civil rights leader’s last journey. Although some have disputed the story, Jackson later said he was standing under the balcony at the Lorraine Motel, talking with King, when he was shot.
Political aspirations, global leader
Jackson, who was ordained a Baptist minister in 1968, left SCLC in 1971 to start Operation PUSH — later the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.
He built a presence on the world stage, visiting South Africa in 1979 to speak out against apartheid and later going to the Middle East to support the creation of a Palestinian state. He was there in 1994 when Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide arrived in Port-au-Prince on a U.S plane filled with dignitaries.
In 1984, he sought the Democratic presidential nomination, placing third behind the frontrunner, former Vice President Walter Mondale. He launched a second presidential campaign in 1988 at the Raleigh Convention Center to a crowd of 5,000 gathered for the first national convention of the Rainbow Coalition.
In his speech, Jackson acknowledged his high name recognition, which helped him to second place in the primary, losing to Dukakis.
“I have spent the last 25 years, not as a perfect servant, but as a public servant,” he told the crowd. “My name has become known because I have served. That’s why I want to be president — to serve the American people.”
Jackson remained a common sight at times of national crisis and in national protests, marching against the Iraq war in the early 2000s and showing up to support Black families who lost their sons to police violence.
In 2009, he was a witness as the nation swore in Barack Obama as its first Black president.
His work nationally and internationally regularly earned him a seat at the political table. He shared friendships with top religious and political leaders, and often had a place of honor at the funerals of kings, politicians, athletes, and entertainers, as well as former CORE leader, Durham civil rights attorney and judge Floyd McKissick Sr., whom Jackson memorialized at N.C. Central in 1991.
NC politics, education, social justice
Throughout his life, Jackson regularly visited Greensboro and other parts of North Carolina, taking an active and behind-the-scenes role in its politics, education and social justice issues.
In 1984, Jackson advocated for his political colleague Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt, who was locked in a bitter battle with the incumbent Republican Sen. Jesse Helms for the U.S. Senate seat. Jackson organized a voter registration drive that year to help Hunt, increasing Black registration in the state by 37 percent.
Helms later linked his political opponents, including Hunt, to Jackson and other Black leaders in his campaign ads.
Jackson later stumped for Obama in his 2012 reelection bid, encouraging students to get out the vote at N.C. Central and UNC-Chapel Hill. He also spoke that year at the national Democratic convention in Charlotte.
In 2017, he spoke at the North Carolina NAACP Convention in Raleigh, where he touched on the violence at the August rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the future of Confederate statues.
“We have one flag, the American flag, not the Confederate flag,” Jackson said. “They have no statues of Hitler in Germany because they wanted to heal the nation.”
Other visits took him to St. Augustine’s College (now University) in 1976 for a commencement speech and to Barber-Scotia College in Concord, where he used his name recognition to help launch a national, $4 million fundraising campaign in 1994 to help with the school’s financial problems.
A year earlier, Jackson had traveled to Chapel Hill to meet with UNC Chancellor Paul Hardin and to rally support for the fight to build a Black cultural center on campus. The cultural center was established a few years later, but a freestanding building has never been constructed.
In 1998, he was invited to join a rally in Raleigh aimed at bringing attention to what were described as lingering economic, educational, crime, violence and drug-related problems in the Black community.
Critics of Jackson
But among the many accolades, Jackson’s work also sparked critics, some who accused him of stepping into situations and grandstanding simply for the media attention.
Many still remember how, in 2006, Jackson reached out to the mother of Crystal Mangum, the woman who accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape. Jackson stood with Mangum in support of the allegations, offering her a college scholarship through his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.
Despite later calls for Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, who had joined the chorus against the accused men, to apologize after they were exonerated, neither has done so publicly.
Jackson also was accused of stirring up raw emotions in the North Carolina town of Hamlet in 1991 following a catastrophic fire at the Imperial Food Products plant. When the city’s leaders refused a request to let Jackson speak at a memorial service for the 25 workers who died, several survivors invited him to speak at a private ceremony instead.
The ceremony, held near the mostly Black St. Peter’s United Methodist Church, included the dedication of a monument to the dead just 50 yards from where the city of Hamlet erected its monument. Jackson accused the city’s leaders of having “a slave master” attitude.
“The affected people, who lost their mothers and fathers and aunts and sisters and brothers and uncles, ought to at least have the right to determine who they would like to speak on the occasion of commemorating their relatives,” Jackson said during an interview with News & Observer editors and reporters.
This article appears courtesy of our media partner The Charlotte Observer.