Rev. Jesse Jackson, civil rights leader and staunch activist, dies at 84

CHICAGO - Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Chicago-based civil rights icon, political trailblazer, and lifelong advocate for equality who worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and inspired generations with his call to "never look down on anybody unless you are helping him up," has died at 84.

Jackson died Tuesday morning. His family released a statement which read in part:

"Our father was a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world. 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."

What we know:

Jackson, a longtime civil rights leader and former presidential candidate, had been battling a neurodegenerative disorder known as progressive supranuclear palsy for more than a decade, according to his family. He was initially treated for Parkinson’s syndrome, but his PSP diagnosis was confirmed last April.

The backstory:

A protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he broke with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1971 to form Operation PUSH, initially named People United to Save Humanity, on the South Side of Chicago. In the 1980s, he also founded the National Rainbow Coalition, an organization dedicated to uniting people of all races and backgrounds. The two groups later merged to become today’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, whose mission ranges from promoting minority hiring in corporate America to leading voter registration drives in communities of color.

Jackson stepped down from Rainbow PUSH on July 15.

REMEMBERING JESSE JACKSON: TRIBUTES POUR IN FOR LATE CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER

Jackson was a driving force in the modern civil rights movement, pushing for voting rights and education. Among other things, he joined George Floyd’s family at a memorial for the slain Black man and participated in COVID-19 vaccination drives to counter vaccine hesitancy in the Black community.

Before Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, Jackson was the most successful Black presidential candidate. He won 13 primaries and caucuses in his push for the 1988 Democratic nomination, which went to Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.

CIVIL RIGHTS PIONEER

Jackson’s passion for civil rights was deep in his DNA from his earliest days.

He was arrested in 1960 in his native South Carolina when he and others entered a segregated public library.

Five years later, Jackson joined King in the Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, marches. His world changed with terrible suddenness on the night of April 4, 1968, when King died of an assassin’s bullets on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Jackson was with him.

As the towering leader at the center of the civil rights movement, King had been a dominant presence in the life of the young activist, still in his 20s. In the years that followed, Jackson would come into his own, becoming a familiar public face and powerful orator, fighting for voting rights, equal job and business opportunities for African Americans, and an end to other racial injustices.

"In many ways, history is marked as ‘before’ and ‘after’ Rosa Parks," Jackson said after the death of the woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus helped invigorate the civil rights movement. "She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down."

Jackson continued to emphasize the power of the vote in his later appearances.

ACTIVIST

In 2014, Jackson quietly and without fanfare walked up to a memorial on a street in Ferguson, Missouri, where Black 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death by a white city police officer. He was greeted warmly by people living nearby and those viewing the memorial.

Jackson also joined protesters as they marched through the streets of the St. Louis suburb, demanding justice on Brown’s behalf and a stop to unfair treatment of Black residents by Ferguson officers.

It was one of countless demonstrations Jackson participated in over the decades — marching against apartheid; flashing the peace sign at an anti-Iraq War rally in London; joining striking Red Cross, grocery, and airline workers on picket lines in cities across the nation; getting arrested for protesting at a plant where workers’ jobs were being relocated to China.

Like King and other civil rights leaders, Jackson maintained the belief that change could be achieved through nonviolence.

He led a protest in Flint, Michigan, where a lead-tainted water crisis started when a state-appointed manager in 2014 switched the city’s service to the Flint River from Detroit’s system. The river water was not properly treated, causing lead to leach from aging pipes into Flint homes. Tests later showed high lead levels in some children.

Jackson said there should be "tape around the city, because Flint is a crime scene."

CANDIDATE

In 1984, Jackson entered the presidential arena as an improbable candidate for the Democratic nomination, a Black civil rights activist who thundered against racial injustice and poverty, never sugarcoating his words as he addressed an overwhelmingly white electorate.

He lost the 1984 Democratic nomination to former Vice President Walter Mondale but surprised many with the breadth of his support.

Jackson, who had never run for public office, mobilized surprisingly large support with the passion of his words — an experienced minister who made the campaign trail itself his pulpit. He called his base a "rainbow coalition" as he won the backing of progressives, Blacks, Hispanics, blue-collar workers, and struggling farmers.

Taking aim at poverty and racism, Jackson called for increased federal funding for social programs, cutting the defense budget, and reversing President Ronald Reagan-era tax cuts. He also called for creation of a Palestinian state — something that chilled his relationship with some Jewish voters.

Despite the skepticism that greeted his bid, Jackson won more than 3 million votes. Though he came in a distant third, he was credited with enrolling as many as 2 million Democratic voters that some say helped the party recapture the Senate in 1986.

In a riveting convention speech, Jackson summed up his historic — and imperfect — campaign:

"I am not a perfect servant," he said. "I am a public servant doing my best against the odds. As I develop and serve, be patient. God is not finished with me yet."

Four years later, Jackson made another bid for the White House, this time more experienced and better funded. His message remained the same: America had much work to do to overturn the racial discrimination, poverty, and injustice that had long haunted it.

In that campaign, he won nearly 7 million votes.

NEGOTIATOR

For Jackson, the world was his stage. In his role as a self-styled diplomat, he met with leaders such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, brokered the release of American prisoners, and lobbied for causes such as wiping out apartheid.

His first success came in 1984 when Jackson, then running for president, negotiated the release from Syria of Navy Lt. Robert Goodman, who was shot down over Lebanon. That same year, Jackson visited Castro, who then freed dozens of American and Cuban prisoners from Cuban jails. In 1990, Jackson helped secure the release from Iraq of hundreds of foreign women and children being detained as human shields to ward off an American military attack after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

Critics sometimes accused Jackson of showboating and meddling in foreign policy, but his diplomatic forays also won him praise. After Goodman’s release, Reagan, in a White House ceremony, called Jackson’s trip to Syria "a personal mission of mercy" worthy of admiration.

Jackson once explained his foreign policy strategy: "Humanitarian appeals always help. They penetrate deeper than political trade-offs."

And at a ceremony in Chicago to mark the 30th anniversary of Goodman’s release, Jackson summed up his negotiating skills with a simple declaration:

"Talking matters. No talking never works."

FAMILY MAN

For Jackson, the world was his stage. In his role as a self-styled diplomat, he met with leaders such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, brokered the release of American prisoners, and lobbied for causes such as wiping out apartheid.

His first success came in 1984 when Jackson, then running for president, negotiated the release from Syria of Navy Lt. Robert Goodman, who was shot down over Lebanon. That same year, Jackson visited Castro, who then freed dozens of American and Cuban prisoners from Cuban jails. In 1990, Jackson helped secure the release from Iraq of hundreds of foreign women and children being detained as human shields to ward off an American military attack after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

Critics sometimes accused Jackson of showboating and meddling in foreign policy, but his diplomatic forays also won him praise. After Goodman’s release, Reagan, in a White House ceremony, called Jackson’s trip to Syria "a personal mission of mercy" worthy of admiration.

Jackson once explained his foreign policy strategy: "Humanitarian appeals always help. They penetrate deeper than political trade-offs."

And at a ceremony in Chicago to mark the 30th anniversary of Goodman’s release, Jackson summed up his negotiating skills with a simple declaration:

"Talking matters. No talking never works."

FIGHTER

After publicly disclosing his Parkinson’s disease in 2017, Jackson vowed to keep plugging away for the causes that had helped define him.

In September 2021, Jackson and his wife were hospitalized with COVID-19. He had been vaccinated; she had not. The illness worsened his Parkinson’s symptoms and affected his ability to walk and talk. After months of intensive therapy, Jackson returned to public life, continuing to protest injustice and advocate for the underserved.

Over the course of his life, Jackson received more than 35 honorary degrees and was honored countless times for his humanitarian and civil rights work.

"I will continue to try to instill hope in the hopeless, expand our democracy to the disenfranchised and free innocent prisoners around the world," he wrote. "I steadfastly affirm that I would rather wear out than rust out."