‘We stood on his shoulders’

Jesse Jackson dies at 84

18 Feb 2026 - The Guardian

Melissa Hellmann Martin Pengelly

The Rev Jesse Jackson, the civil rights campaigner who was prominent for more than 50 years and who ran strongly for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, died yesterday. He was 84.

“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.

“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 honour his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by.”

No cause of death was given. Jackson had progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) for more than a decade. He was originally diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He was also twice hospitalised with Covid.

A fixture in the civil rights movement and Democratic politics since the 1960s, Jackson became close to Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

In an interview with the Guardian in May 2020, Jackson said: “I was a trailblazer, I was a pathfinder. I had to deal with doubt and cynicism and fears about a Black person running. There were Black scholars writing papers about why I was wasting my time. Even Blacks said a Black couldn’t win.”

Twenty years after his second run for president, the first Black president, Barack Obama, saluted Jackson for making his victory possible. Obama celebrated in Chicago, also home to Jackson.

Obama said yesterday: “Michelle got her first glimpse of political organising at the Jacksons’ kitchen table when she was a teenager. And in his two historic runs for president, he laid the foundation for my own campaign to the highest office of the land… We stood on his shoulders.”

“It was a big moment in history,” Jackson said of Obama’s victory. In an interview with NPR, he said: “I cried because I thought about those who made it possible who were not there … People who paid a real price: Ralph Abernathy, Dr King, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, those who fought like hell [at the Democratic national convention] in Atlantic City in 64, those in the movement in the south.”

During the Covid pandemic, Jackson campaigned against disparities in care, asking: “After 400 years of slavery, segregation and discrimination, why would anybody be shocked that African Americans are dying disproportionately from the coronavirus?”

He also said all past presidents had failed to “end the virus of white superiority and fix the multifaceted issues confronting African Americans”.

Born on 8 October 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson became involved in politics at an early age as he navigated the segregated south. He was elected class president at the all-Black Sterling high school, where he also excelled in athletics. In 1959, he received a football scholarship to the University of Illinois. The Chicago White Sox offered him a place on their baseball team, but he decided to focus on his education instead.

During winter break in his first year of college, Jackson returned home to Greenville and tried to obtain a book needed for his studies from the whiteonly Greenville public library, but he was turned away. The experience stayed with him. A few months later on 16 July 1960, Jackson and seven Black high school students entered the Greenville library for a peaceful protest. After browsing the library and reading books, the group later known as the Greenville Eight were arrested for disorderly conduct and later released on a $30 bond. A judge ruled that they had the right to use the publicly funded institution, and the Greenville library system became integrated in September 1960.

Jackson did not return to the University of Illinois after his first year, and instead transferred to the historically Black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, where he played football as a quarterback, was the national officer for the Black fraternity, Omega Psi Phi, and was elected the student body president. While earning a sociology degree, he also continued his activism by participating in sit-ins at restaurants in Greensboro.

“My leadership skills came from the athletic arena,” Jackson told the Washington Post in 1984. “In many ways, they were developed from playing quarterback. Assessing defences; motivating your own team. When the game starts, you use what you’ve got – and don’t cry about what you don’t have. You run to your strength. You also practise to win.”

At college, Jackson met his future wife Jacqueline, whom he married in 1962 and had five children with – Santita, Jesse Jr, Jonathan Luther, Yusef DuBois, and Jacqueline Jr. He would later go on to have a sixth child, Ashley, during an extramarital affair with Karin Stanford in the early 2000s.

Jackson first met King, who would become his mentor, at an airport in Atlanta in the early 1960s. King had followed Jackson’s student activism from afar for several years.

In 1964, Jackson enrolled at the Chicago Theological Seminary, as he continued to be involved in the civil rights movement. Jackson travelled with his classmates to Selma, Alabama, to join the movement after he watched news footage of Bloody Sunday, where nonviolent civil rights marchers who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, were then beaten by law enforcement officers. Impressed by Jackson’s leadership at Selma, King offered him a position with the civil rights group that he co-founded, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

After a couple of years, Jackson put his seminary studies on hold to focus on SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket, an economic justice programme that harnessed the power of Black churches by calling on ministers to pressure companies to employ more Black people through negotiations and boycotts. In 1967, Jackson became Operation Breadbasket’s national director, and was ordained as a minister a year later.

“We knew he was going to do a good job,” King said at an Operation Breadbasket meeting in 1968, “but he’s done better than a good job.”

Tragedy struck soon after Jackson gained a leadership position at SCLC. On 4 April 1968, Jackson witnessed King’s assassination from below the balcony at the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

“Every time I think about it, it’s like pulling a scab off a sore,” he told the Guardian in 2018. “It’s a hurtful, painful thought: that a man of love is killed by hate; that a man of peace should be killed by violence; a man who cared is killed by the careless.”

In 1984, Jackson ran for president, becoming the second Black person to launch a nationwide campaign following Shirley Chisholm more than a decade earlier.

“Tonight we come together bound by our faith in a mighty God, with genuine respect and love for our country, and inheriting the legacy of a great party, the Democratic party, which is the best hope for redirecting our nation on a more humane, just, and peaceful course,” Jackson told an audience at the 1984 Democratic national convention in San Francisco. He lost the nomination to the former vice-president Walter Mondale.

After his first presidential run, Jackson created the National Rainbow Coalition to push for voting rights and social programmes. Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination a second time in 1988, performing strongly but lost to Michael Dukakis.

Jackson took King’s work forward, staying to the fore in the civil rights movement through a tumultuous half-century of US history, through to the election of Donald Trump and the rise of Black Lives Matter.

“Dr King believed in multiracial, multicultural coalitions of conscience, not ethnic nationalism,” he said in 2018. “He felt nationalism – whether Black, white or brown – was narrowly conceived, given our global challenges. So having a multiracial setting said much about his vision of America and the world, what America should stand for as well as the world.

“The arc of the moral universe is long and it bends towards justice, but you have to pull it to bend. It doesn’t bend automatically. Dr King used to remind us that every time the movement has a tailwind and goes forward, there are headwinds.

“Those who oppose change in some sense were re-energised by the Trump demagoguery. Dr King would have been disappointed by his victory but he would have been prepared for it psychologically.

“He would have said: ‘We must not surrender our spirits. We must use this not to surrender but fortify our faith and fight back.’”

***

His story mapped his country’s transformation – and ultimately made a Black president possible

18 Feb 2026 - The Guardian

David Smith

He witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Forty years later, he joined the jubilant crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park to greet Barack Obama’s election victory and had tears streaming down his face.

Jesse Jackson, who died yesterday at the age of 84, was hailed by Martin Luther King III and his wife Arndrea Waters King as “a living bridge between generations”. He was the most influential African American political voice between King and Obama. His two runs for the Democratic nomination created the imaginative space for a Black president. He was the architect of a “rainbow coalition” that shapes the Democratic party today.

“My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised,” Jackson, a Baptist minister, told the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. “They are restless and seek relief.”

Jackson’s story mapped the transformation of the Democrats, and the vicissitudes of America, for more than eight decades. He was born in Greenville, South Carolina, during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, two months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

It was also the Jim Crow era of racial segregation. Jackson never forgot the first time his mother led him to the back of a bus. On Saturday mornings he worked at a bakery that had separate water fountains for Black and white people. He once said: “I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had a shovel programmed for my hands.”

By the 1960s a political realignment was under way, with Democrats moving to embrace civil rights, culminating in President Lyndon Johnson championing the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 while Republican Richard Nixon’s 1968 “southern strategy” sought to win over white, socially conservative voters in the south.

Jackson publicly positioned himself as King’s successor. He advocated for the poor and underrepresented on issues from voting rights and job opportunities to education and healthcare. Just as King had condemned the war in Vietnam, Jackson travelled to South Africa in 1979, just after Steve Biko’s death, advocating for US sanctions on the apartheid regime and supporting Nelson Mandela’s anti-apartheid struggle.

But unlike King, Jackson took the leap into party politics. He considering starting his own party in 1971. He campaigned for Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1980 and became a vital force in registering Black voters.

Despite once telling a Black audience he would not run for president “because white people are incapable of appreciating me”, in 1984 Jackson became the second Black candidate from a major party to run for president.

He ran again in 1988 and won 13 primaries and caucuses, coming second to Michael Dukakis and ensuring that African American issues became fundamental to the Democratic party platform. He later recalled: “I was able to run for the presidency twice and redefine what was possible; it raised the lid for women and other people of colour. Part of my job was to sow seeds of the possibilities.”

Yesterday Kamala Harris, the first Black vice-president, whose presidential bid was defeated by Trump in 2024, recalled driving to law school in the 1980s in California with a “Jesse Jackson for President” bumper sticker. She wrote on X: “You would not believe how people from every walk of life would give me a thumbs up or honk of support.”

His White House bids had helped lay the groundwork for the election of America’s first Black president two decades later. Jackson openly wept in the crowd as Obama celebrated his 2008 presidential election victory in Chicago. His legacy continues in a modern Democratic coalition that includes progressives, African Americans, Latinos and the white working class – a coalition that Donald Trump has sought to break apart.