CHICAGO EMBRACED JACKSON — AND HE DID IN RETURN

SUN-TIMES LIBRARY 

The Rev. Jesse Jackson addresses the crowd gathered in the 

auditorium of Operation PUSH headquarters on July 25, 1973.

Family and friends say the young leader and future civil rights icon was nurtured by the community he found upon moving here

19 feb 2026 - Chicago Sun-Times

ESTHER YOON-JI KANG AND NICOLE JEANINE JOHNSON

In 1964, Jesse and Jacqueline Jackson drove into Chicago from North Carolina, where they had met, married and had their first child.

In the car, with 1-year-old Santita in tow, a pregnant Jacqueline looked around at the tall buildings Downtown and asked her husband a question.

“Jesse, do you think anyone will get to know us here?”

The newly minted North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College grad was optimistic and reassuring. He turned to his college sweetheart and said: “Baby, I think we’re going to be OK. What we’re going to do is get to work, and we’re going to be just fine.”

In the decades that followed, the Rev. Jesse Jackson left a profound mark on the city where he organized and founded what would become the influential civil rights organization Rainbow PUSH Coalition. But in interviews with WBEZ, his friends and family also paint a portrait of how the generous and loyal community he found in Chicago sustained the civil rights icon throughout his life.

Singer and political commentator Santita Jackson talked not about the political power her father amassed in Chicago, but about the warm welcome and mutual aid he and his family received — particularly in those early years — from a veritable who’swho of storied Black Chicagoans.

“We were never alone, never alone, and that’s the great thing about this city,” the 63-year-old said. “It is a city that will embrace you.”

Santita and her family found themselves in need of that tight hug on Tuesday morning, just hours after their father passed.

Spencer Leak Jr., a close friend of the family, said when he got the call about the reverend’s passing, he hopped in his car at 1:42 a.m. and went to be with the Jacksons. He said Jacqueline Jackson, now 81, held him and said, “Boy, you better squeeze me tight because if it wasn’t for your grandfather, we don’t know where we would be.”

It was Leak’s grandfather, A.R. Leak, an established businessman and owner of what is now Leak & Sons Funeral Homes, who provided an apartment for the young Jacksons to live in as they got their footing in their new town.

“[The Leaks] said, ‘We’ve got a nice building, and we live in it,’ ” Santita Jackson said. “They helped [my parents] to establish a line of credit so they could buy furniture, and they carpeted the apartment so the children could roll around and play all we wanted.”

The families would stay close friends and neighbors in South Shore for years to come, with their children becoming like brothers and sisters.

Spencer Leak Jr., now 56, recalled playing basketball with the Jackson boys in the driveway and having dinner with the family.

“No politics [were] brought up; it was just all laughing and joking like a family,” Leak said. “The public knows Reverend Jackson as this civil rights leader. I know him as a father [figure] and a brother to my dad.”

Leak also recalled slapping “Run Jesse Run” stickers on cars during the reverend’s historic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984.

Spiritual mentorship

But long before Jesse Jackson ascended to the national stage, he struggled to provide for his growing family in his early Chicago days.

Santita Jackson recalled the time in the mid-1960s when her dad, by then a father of three who had run out of scholarship money from the Chicago Theological Seminary, was waiting in line at a food pantry at Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church, where he was serving as a youth minister.

Santita Jackson said the legendary civil rights leader Rev. Clay Evans, founder of Fellowship church, pulled her father over and said “I’m not gonna let you stand in this line.” After that day, Evans and the church made sure the family had groceries each week, and that the young parents had the best babysitters the congregation could offer.

Another pastor, Rev. James Bevel, vouched for Jesse Jackson to lead Martin Luther King Jr.’s Operation Breadbasket — which would quickly elevate Jackson in the civil rights movement and lay the foundation for what later became Rainbow PUSH.

Rev. Martin Deppe, a United Methodist Church pastor who worked on Operation Breadbasket, would also remain a close friend of Jackson's. He recounted to WBEZ about the first time he saw the captivating leader.

“He came in, and like wildfire, within two or three weeks, he was running the meeting,” Deppe said. “His charisma [and] strengths were so, so evident that the leading Black pastors yielded the gavel to him.”

Deppe said Chicago's pastors embraced the magnetic Jackson, mentoring him and connecting him to other powerful businessmen and city leaders — especially as Operation Breadbasket began attracting thousands of members.

“[Jackson] didn't start out in politics, he started out in the church,” said Deppe, author of “Operation Breadbasket: An Untold Story of Civil Rights in Chicago, 1966-1971.”

As Jackson's star rose in the 1970s and 80s, Chicago's pastoral community provided spiritual guidance. Evans, who had pulled Jacksonout of the bread line decades earlier, would remain a mentor and close confidant, according to Rev. James Meeks.

“Reverend Clay Evans was the pastor of this family until his death” in 2019, Meeks said.

Finding community in S. Shore

In addition to the spiritual and material support Jackson received, his children, too, would flourish and find their own way in the City of Big Shoulders.

Yusef Jackson, the reverend's youngest son who is now chief operating officer at Rainbow PUSH, said the South Shore neighborhood played a crucial role in his family's life.

“What made the South Shore community so special was they allowed us to be normal children in public school, playing in the park,” he told WBEZ. “Each Jackson lives in South Shore [today]. That's how important the community is to us.”

Santita Jackson said she “couldn't ask for more” from her hometown. “It sent two of my brothers [Jesse Jr. and Jonathan] to Congress, it's given me a wonderful career in radio,” she said.

When asked whether her father ever considered moving to another city, she scoffed, adding that Chicago was the only place her father could do the work he did.

“It is a town that is full of strivers, of people who really came here to grow: Blacks who had been chased out of the South, refugees and immigrants looking for opportunities,” she continued, remembering the young couple that drove through downtown Chicago on that day in 1964.

She added: “Go elsewhere for what? There is no place like Chicago, and it is our home.”

***

CANDACE DANE CHAMBERS / SUN-TIMES 

Jesse Jackson Jr. (from left), U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson, Ashley Jackson, 

Santita Jackson and Yusef Jackson speak Wednesday in South Shore.

FAMILY VOWS TO CONTINUE FIGHT FOR JUSTICE

19 Feb 2026 - Chicago Sun-Times

BY CINDY HERNANDEZ, STAFF REPORTER 

chernandez@suntimes.com | @cindylu_7

Though the Rev. Jesse Jackson was widely recognized as a civil rights icon, his children say that first and foremost he was a father who “took fatherhood very seriously” and loved his family.

His children shared emotional tributes Wednesday morning during a news conference outside the reverend's South Shore home, reflecting on their father's legacy and lasting impact as a civil rights leader.

The reverend rose to prominence in the 1960s as a protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who his children said “saw something special” in their father. Jesse Jackson joined King's cause and carried that mission to Chicago, where he championed key causes of the Civil Rights Movement.

“There is no one who's been more faithful to the mission of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King than Rev. Jesse Lewis Jackson,” said Santita Jackson, Jesse Jackson's eldest daughter.

Jesse Jackson died peacefully early Tuesday morning surrounded by his family. Even in his final moments, Jackson's children said their father never spoke about his pain and continued to “bounce back,” driven by his lifelong devotion to helping others.

Yusef Jackson, Jesse Jackson's youngest son, said what kept his father going “was not his desire for more life, but his desire for more service.''

His family said they reassured Jesse Jackson before he died that they would “continue his work.”

“Each of my siblings and my mother, we wanted to give him comfort that it was going to be all right, that he has taught us enough to continue his work,” said Yusef Jackson.

Yusef Jackson said he would be taking the reins of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the famed Chicago-based multiracial nonprofit Jesse Jacksonstarted in 1970.

In the 1980s, Jesse Jackson ran the first viable presidential campaign by a Black candidate. His son, U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson, said he would use his congressional seat to continue to fight for equality.

“That's our calling, that's our mission, and that's what we're going to fight for,” said Jonathan Jackson.

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JACKSON TO LIE IN STATE AT RAINBOW PUSH HQ; FUNERAL PLANS RELEASED

19 feb 2026 - Chicago Sun-Times

BY FRAN SPIELMAN, CITY HALL REPORTER 

fspielman@suntimes.com | @fspielman

Mayor Brandon Johnson said Wednesday the “power exists in all of us” to honor Rev. Jesse Jackson ‘‘with action'' and urged the City Council and all Chicagoans to do just that to honor “one of the most consequential civil rights leaders of our time.”

“We can best honor Reverend Jackson by ‘keeping hope alive,' '' the mayor said before leading the Council in a moment of silence for Jackson and his grieving family. “We do that by organizing with our neighbors, advocating on their behalf and investing in the people of Chicago. In the loving memory of Reverend Jackson, let us go forth in building a just, equitable and thriving city and nation.”

Johnson has said he would not have risen to the mayor's office without standing on Jackson's shoulders. On Wednesday, the mayor talked about the poignant personal advice that Jackson, his mentor and role model, gave him when Johnson was ‘‘experiencing one of the more difficult times in my time as an organizer'' for the Chicago Teachers Union.

‘‘Rev. Jackson reminded me that, before people were on that Edmund Pettus Bridge, it took an awful lot to organize city to city to get to Selma,” Johnson said. “That day everybody and their mother was on that bridge. But in reality that wasn't the case. That in most instances, transformation and change takes place by just the work of a few."