Rev. Jesse Jackson Dies at 84          02/17 06:19

   

   CHICAGO (AP) -- The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, a protege of the Rev. Martin 
Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate who led the Civil Rights 
Movement for decades after the revered leader's assassination, died Tuesday. He 
was 84.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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 activist the Rev. Al Sharpton said his mentor "was not 
simply a civil rights leader; he was a movement unto himself."

   "He taught me that protest must have purpose, that faith must have feet, and 
that justice is not seasonal, it is daily work," Sharpton wrote in a statement, 
adding that Jackson taught "trying is as important as triumph. That you do not 
wait for the dream to come true; you work to make it real."

   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.

   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.

   A student athlete drawn to the Civil Rights Movement

   Jesse Louis Jackson was born on Oct. 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, 
the son of high school student Helen Burns and Noah Louis Robinson, a married 
man who lived next door. Jackson was later adopted by Charles Henry Jackson, 
who married his mother.

   Jackson was a star quarterback on the football team at Sterling High School 
in Greenville, and accepted a football scholarship from the University of 
Illinois. But after he reportedly was told Black people couldn't play 
quarterback, he transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he 
became the first-string quarterback, an honor student in sociology and 
economics, and student body president.

   Arriving on the historically Black campus in 1960 just months after students 
there launched sit-ins at a whites-only diner, Jackson immersed himself in the 
blossoming Civil Rights Movement.

   By 1965, he joined the voting rights march King led from Selma to 
Montgomery, Alabama. King dispatched him to Chicago to launch Operation 
Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference effort to pressure 
companies to hire Black workers.

   Jackson called his time with King "a phenomenal four years of work."

   Jackson was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was 
slain at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Jackson's account of the 
assassination was that King died in his arms.

   With his flair for the dramatic, Jackson wore a turtleneck he said was 
soaked with King's blood for two days, including at a King memorial service 
held by the Chicago City Council, where he said: "I come here with a heavy 
heart because on my chest is the stain of blood from Dr. King's head."

   However, several King aides, including speechwriter Alfred Duckett, 
questioned whether Jackson could have gotten King's blood on his clothing. 
There are no images of Jackson in pictures taken shortly after the 
assassination.

   In 1971, Jackson broke with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to 
form Operation PUSH, originally named People United to Save Humanity. The 
organization based on Chicago's South Side declared a sweeping mission, from 
diversifying workforces to registering voters in communities of color 
nationwide. Using lawsuits and threats of boycotts, Jackson pressured top 
corporations to spend millions and publicly commit to diversifying their 
workforces.

   The constant campaigns often left his wife, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, the 
college sweetheart he married in 1963, taking the lead in raising their five 
children: Santita Jackson, Yusef DuBois Jackson, Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson 
Jr., and two future members of Congress, U.S. Rep. Jonathan Luther Jackson and 
Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who resigned in 2012 but is seeking reelection in the 
2026 midterms.

   The elder Jackson, who was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968 and earned 
his Master of Divinity in 2000, also acknowledged fathering a child, Ashley 
Jackson, with one of his employees at Rainbow/PUSH, Karen L. Stanford. He said 
he understood what it means to be born out of wedlock and supported her 
emotionally and financially.

   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 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.

   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."

   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."