“Keep hope alive”. This was Jesse Jackson’s message, delivered at the end of his famous 1988 speech at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, his second campaign for the presidential nomination.
Jackson was an impassioned orator, offering a voice for the voiceless. Raised in the segregated South, he rose to prominence in the civil rights era and became a close associate of Martin Luther King Jr.
He used that 1988 speech to call on Americans, left and right, black and white, to find common ground.
“The only time that we win is when we come together,” he told the audience. “Wherever you are tonight, you can make it. Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. Don’t you surrender. Suffering breeds character, character breeds faith. In the end, faith will not disappoint.”
Jackson never did become president but blazed the trail for a new era, for a night 20 years after his speech when Barack Obama realised that dream.
His activism and political career was not without controversy, and he weathered several storms throughout his years in the spotlight. However, he remained America’s pre-eminent civil rights figure for decades.
Born Jesse Louis Burns in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941, Jackson’s mother was a 16-year-old high school student and his father a 33-year-old married man who lived next door. His mother later married another man who adopted him.
He grew up in the Jim Crow era, the often brutally enforced set of racist laws to subjugate black Americans in the South, and was segregated from white neighbours. He earned a football scholarship at the University of Illinois, but transferred to a historically black college because he said he experienced discrimination.
Civil rights activism began when he was a student, and he was once arrested after seeking to enter a “whites-only” public library.
Jackson was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968 and his activism was noticed by Martin Luther King Jr. He became his protege.
He was there at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on the day King was assassinated, and claimed to have worn a shirt said to be soaked with the murdered civil rights leader’s blood the following day.
He set up his own civil rights organisation in Chicago, Operation PUSH, in the early 1970s, and in 1984 founded the National Rainbow Coalition, advocating also for women and gay rights. PUSH and the National Rainbow Coalition merged in 1996 and are now the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.
‘Our time has come’
Jackson ran for president for the first time in 1984. Some Democrats did not agree with his campaign, saying said his ideas were too left-leaning and could be detrimental to the party.
He dismissed criticism, saying the party’s mission should be to feed the hungry and house the homeless.
“My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised,” he said in his 1984 Democratic Convention speech. The mantra then: “Our time has come.”
During both his presidential runs, Jackson attracted black voters and many white liberals but fell short of becoming the first black major party White House nominee.
He later served as Democratic president Bill Clinton’s special envoy to Africa in the 1990s, and was instrumental in securing the release of a number of Americans and others held overseas in places such as Syria, Cuba, Iraq and Serbia.
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.
In 2000, he received the highest US civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from Clinton.
Despite health challenges in his final years he continued protesting against racial injustice into the era of Black Lives Matter, condemning the police killing of George Floyd.
“This season of ugliness brought about by the lynching of George Floyd has brought the best and worst out of us,” he told Sky News at the time. “The worst is lynching but the best is fighting back.”
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.
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Jesse Jackson: A life in pictures
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Jackson’s career was also marked by some controversies. In 1984 he faced allegations of using a slur in reference to Jewish people, comments he initially denied. However, he later offered an apology while speaking at a synagogue, according to a New York Times article.
Jackson married his wife, Jacqueline Brown, in 1962, and they had five children. In 1999, he also had a daughter with a woman who worked at his civil rights groups; he later said he understood what it meant to be born out of wedlock and committed to supporting her emotionally and financially.
In 2008, he made headlines when he complained that Obama was “talking down to black people” in comments captured by a microphone. However, when he joined the jubilant crowd in Chicago to greet the new president on election night, he had tears streaming down his face.
“I wish for a moment that Dr King… could’ve just been there for 30 seconds to see the fruits of their labour,” he told the Associated Press news agency in a later interview. “I became overwhelmed. It was the joy and the journey.”
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In 2017, he announced he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease after experiencing symptoms for three years. Doctors later confirmed a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a life-threatening neurological disorder, and he was admitted to hospital in November.
Following his death, tributes have been paid to a trailblazer who spoke up for minorities, for the poor and underrepresented.
“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,” he told the Associated Press. “Part of my job was to sow seeds of the possibilities.”
