CHICAGO — The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, the Chicago-based Baptist minister, political figure and two-time presidential candidate whose soaring oratory and knack for capturing media attention made him a central figure in the Civil Rights Movement and national politics for more than six decades, died Tuesday. He was 84.

Jackson battled Parkinson’s disease since 2017, and in April, he was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, a neurological disorder.

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

A public memorial service will be held in Chicago and announced at a later date, according to the family.

Raised in South Carolina under Jim Crow segregation laws, Jackson became a protege of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. until the Black leader’s 1968 assassination, and he participated with King in the famed 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches. In Chicago, Jackson led King’s civil rights group and later established activist and social justice organizations that eventually evolved into the Kenwood-based Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. The organization became a driving force for social justice and civil rights, especially during the 1980s, as Jackson built a reputation both as a peripatetic champion of the economically and politically downtrodden and as an expert power player who organized boycotts against major companies he felt weren’t hiring minorities or investing in minority communities.

“He is a political force of nature,” Tribune columnist Steve Daley wrote in 1990, years after Jackson’s two unsuccessful but popular runs for president surprised many observers. “At once an eloquent voice for the dispossessed and a relentless manipulator of events and issues, hopscotching from coal strike to South Africa to statehood for the District of Columbia.”

Known for his rhetorical flourishes and his short, catchy and sometimes-rhythmic and rhyming phrases — ideal as sound bites — Jackson sought to instill self-confidence in Black people with his trademark call-and-response celebration of the self that started with “I am somebody.” Another signature line was his anti-drug refrain, “Down with dope, up with hope.”

“Jackson’s appeal was a function of his hybridity — his political ambitions and protest inclinations went hand-in-hand with his King-like ability to link American progressivism to Black religiosity,” said In These Times senior editor and WVON-AM host Salim Muwakkil, a longtime observer of Jackson.

Brash and at times divisive, Jackson weathered several scandals. In 1984, he was caught using a Jewish slur in calling New York City “ Hymietown,” while a 2008 live mic caught him saying he thought Barack Obama had been “talking down to Black people” and that he wanted to “cut (Obama’s) nuts out.” And in 2001, the married Jackson briefly stepped away from leading Rainbow/PUSH after confirming that he had fathered a daughter through an affair with an employee.

Although the lone public office to which Jackson was elected was Washington, D.C.’s “shadow senator” — an advocacy post created to lobby for D.C.’s statehood— two of his six children became congressmen. Son Jonathan Jackson has represented Illinois’ 1st Congressional District since 2023, while Jesse Jackson Jr. represented Illinois’ 2nd Congressional District for 17 years until resigning in 2012 amid a federal investigation involving misuse of campaign funds. Jesse Jackson Jr. and his wife, Sandi, pleaded guilty to using about $750,000 in campaign cash to support a lavish lifestyle and both served prison terms. Jackson said little publicly about his son’s wrongdoing, other than describing the ordeal as a difficult, trying time for the family and requesting prayers. Jackson Jr. is now running for the seat once again.

‘I had no name’

Born Jesse Louis Burns at home in Greenville, South Carolina, on Oct. 8, 1941, Jackson was the son of Helen Burns and her married next-door neighbor, Noah Louis Robinson. He endured taunts throughout his youth about his out-of-wedlock birth.

“When I had no name, my grandmother gave me her name. My name was Jesse Burns until I was 12,” Jackson told Democratic National Convention attendees in July 1988. “So I wouldn’t have a blank space, she gave me a name to hold me over. I understand when nobody knows your name. I understand when you have no name.”

In 1943, Burns married postal maintenance worker Charles Jackson, who formally adopted Jesse in 1957. The couple raised Jackson in a nurturing environment that stressed religion, education and hard work, with his grandmother Matilda Burns as the soul of the household.

“Ours was a very stable home and a very loving home,” Jackson wrote in a 1970 book, “Up from the Ghetto.” “My mother was a staunch churchgoer and so was my (step)father. … My sense of moral consciousness was developed in our home — an advantage that is denied many city children today.”

Though segregated, Greenville was not on the front lines of the integration movement, nor did it experience the violent white backlash that began to stir elsewhere in the South during Jackson’s upbringing. He nonetheless bristled at Greenville’s segregation, and once protested the segregated restroom facilities and unsafe conditions at a bakery where he worked.

The 6-foot-3 Jackson was a good student and an even better athlete at Greenville’s all-Black Sterling High School, playing basketball and quarterback on the football team and excelling as a baseball pitcher. During his senior year, the San Francisco Giants offered him a $6,000 minor-league contract.

Instead, Jackson accepted a football scholarship from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Realizing after one year there that he would not be allowed to play quarterback, Jackson transferred to the historically Black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, where he played quarterback and studied sociology and economics. He was also student body president.

Greensboro was on the cutting edge of the Civil Rights Movement, and during college, Jackson led near-daily demonstrations and sit-ins to integrate public accommodations. At protests, he met Jacqueline Davis, a student from Fort Pierce, Florida. The couple married in 1962. In 1964, Jackson graduated with honors, earning a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

Operation PUSH

After college, Jackson enrolled at the Chicago Theological Seminary; he left in 1967 before earning enough credits for a degree, though the seminary awarded him an honorary doctor of divinity degree in 1969 and a master’s degree in 2000. During seminary, Jackson was so outraged by the violent police response to protests in the South that he organized fellow students to participate in protests in Selma, Alabama, where he met King and joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Jackson returned to Chicago to head the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation Breadbasket, an economic arm focused on opening doors for Blacks as employees, promoting Black-owned enterprises’ products and encouraging white businesses to invest in Black institutions. Their weapons were organized pickets and boycotts followed by negotiations.

In 1968, Jackson gained national prominence after King was assassinated on a motel balcony. Jackson had been one floor below King in a parking lot, and he later said he rushed to the balcony after hearing the shots. While the rest of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference remained in Memphis to deal with the crisis, Jackson returned to Chicago, appearing on TV the next morning and then at a Chicago City Council memorial wearing a shirt smeared with blood, leading those around him to believe that he had been with King when King was shot.

Jackson and his supporters sought to portray him as King’s natural successor in the civil rights arena. He continued with Breadbasket’s operations in Chicago until 1971, when the SCLC’s new leader, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, ordered Jackson to take a leave of absence over concerns about the bookkeeping for a Breadbasket offshoot that had organized an annual trade fair.

That prompted Jackson to quit the SCLC altogether and form Operation PUSH, first an acronym for People United to Save Humanity and later for the less ambitious People United to Serve Humanity. Operating from a former synagogue at 920 E. 50th St. in the Kenwood neighborhood, Operation PUSH became Jackson’s own personal vehicle.

Jackson used Operation PUSH both for public good and to elevate his visibility. He organized boycotts against major corporations, including Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Southland Corp. and Heublein Inc.

A prominent local boycott by Operation PUSH began in 1985, after WBBM-Ch. 2 demoted Black anchorman Harry Porterfield. Jackson and others from Operation PUSH eventually walked a picket line in front of WBBM’s Streeterville studios. He complained that the Chicago news media had deliberately avoided covering the boycott and had engaged in a “conspiracy of silence for six months.”

Jackson’s goals were for WBBM to hire two male minority news anchors, establish an employment goal of 40% for minorities and donate $10 million to the United Negro College Fund. Asked if his demands constituted extortion, Jackson demurred.

“Extortion is illegal,” he told the Tribune. “Negotiations are proper, and when they fail, economic withdrawal is proper.”

Jackson ended the 10-month boycott after WBBM’s management highlighted recent increases in hiring minorities and women, as well as steps taken to enhance minority representation in procurement. WBBM also hired its first Black general manager, Johnathan Rodgers.

Presidential runs

Another area of visibility for Jackson? His long-standing practice of leading Christmas Day services at Cook County Jail, angrily imploring inmates at times to make better choices and to take control of their lives.

“They must build stair steps out of here,” Jackson told reporters after the 1988 service. “Registering to vote and starting to be a good citizen is a good way to start.”

Much of Jackson’s nationwide attention owed to his strong interest in national politics, including two presidential runs.

“My religion obligates me to be political, but my politics don’t obligate me to be religious,” said Jackson — frequently introduced to audiences as the Country Preacher — at a 1985 news conference. “So it is out of the religious imperative that I fight for economic justice and fight for peace and fight for ‘the least of these.’”

In a stunning, once-unimaginable early success in politics, Jackson joined then-Ald. William Singer to unseat then-Mayor Richard J. Daley’s slate of delegates to the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami. Pragmatic enough to work with Democrats and Republicans alike, Jackson later endorsed Republican Sen. Charles Percy and Govs. James Thompson and Richard Ogilvie.

Jackson’s frequent travel — including to crisis locations where governments held U.S. citizens captive — earned him the sobriquet “ Jetstream Jesse” from newspaper columnist Mike Royko. When one captive, Navy Lt. Robert Goodman, was held in Syria in 1983 after being shot down over Lebanon, Jackson persuaded Syria’s president to release Goodman. The attendant publicity helped fuel Jackson’s 1984 unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Running for president was a logical next step for Jackson, given his ubiquitousness in American life. By the mid-1980s, Jackson had become the media’s go-to person for just about anything related to Black America, Muwakkil said.

“Mediagenic and quick-witted, he seldom failed to provide the appropriate sound bite,” Muwakkil said. “Mainstream media started treating Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition as the mouthpiece of Black politics.”

Jackson ran again for president in 1988, attracting 7 million votes and winning 13 of 54 contests. Though he came in fourth place in Iowa’s Democratic caucuses, he won five states on Super Tuesday and defeated the eventual nominee, Michael Dukakis, in a landslide in Michigan. Jackson long had sought a “rainbow coalition” backing his candidacy, and support from white farmers, factory workers, old-fashioned liberals and his near-solid core of Black supporters made him a force and an enigma.

“Your back is against the wall, your job is up for grabs and your farm is about to be foreclosed on. Who do you want to argue your case?” he would ask on the campaign trail, often to overwhelmingly white audiences. “I’ve argued your case, I’ve stood with you and now my friends, the working people of America, I want you to stand with me.”

Jackson’s 1988 campaign drew the kind of rural white support normally associated with the GOP.

“He defused a lot of regional racism by reaching out for rural whites during his campaign, and he received little credit for that effort,” Muwakkil said.

Ultimately unsuccessful in his second White House bid, Jackson nonetheless characteristically held center stage at the Democrats’ 1988 convention in Atlanta, where questions swirled about the strength of his support for the Democratic ticket. An expert power player, Jackson knew just when to throw his support for Dukakis to achieve its maximum impact, and then, in an emotional convention speech, how to be humble.

“My right and my privilege to stand here before you have been won, in my lifetime, by the blood and the sweat of the innocent,” he told those gathered.

‘Values don’t change’

Jackson started a national debate in December 1988 over his suggestion at a news conference to change the label for Black people to “African American,” a term he contended was in line with how other ethnic groups refer to their origins and also transmitted a sense of their heritage. The Tribune’s Clarence Page wrote that some Blacks found themselves “amused and bemused at the fuss,” noting that Blacks long had used the term “African American” in everyday conversations and oratory.

“It is a testament to Jackson’s influence that it did not become a Page 1, top-of-the-newshour issue in mainstream media until he spoke out,” Page wrote.

Jackson moved his political operations and residency to Washington, D.C., after the 1984 presidential race. In 1990, Jackson was elected as one of D.C.’s first two “shadow senators” created by city government to lobby for statehood for the district. He stepped down after one term, returning to Chicago and his longtime Tudor Revival-style home in the South Shore neighborhood, which he and his wife bought in 1970.

Jackson served as President Bill Clinton’s envoy to various trouble spots overseas. In 1999, Jackson traveled to the Balkan Peninsula with then-U.S. Rep. Rod Blagojevich to help secure the release of American servicemen captured by Yugoslav forces during the United Nations military campaign in Kosovo.

In 1999, Jackson merged Operation PUSH with his Washington, D.C.-based National Rainbow Coalition, creating Rainbow/PUSH.

Jackson declined a third run for the presidency in 2000, saying that “time spent running for president is time that cannot be spent doing anything else. I’ve got so much work to do, I’ve got so many issues that I want to raise, I’ve got so many battles left to fight.”

Jackson joined Chicagoans in celebrating the election of America’s first Black president, fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama, openly weeping in Grant Park at Obama’s election night rally in 2008.

Jackson continued public appearances into the 2020s. He joined protests after Chicago police in 2015 released a video of a white officer gunning down a Black teenager, Laquan McDonald. The shooting sparked national outrage and a federal probe into the long-plagued Chicago Police Department.

“The whole idea is that we need a massive demonstration,” Jackson told the Tribune in 2015. “And a massive quest for justice.”

Despite Jackson’s 2017 Parkinson’s diagnosis, he remained active, writing a column for the Chicago Sun-Times until 2022, taping segments for Rainbow/PUSH’s Saturday morning forum and participating in his daughter’s radio show. He spoke at demonstrations in Chicago in 2020 after a white Minneapolis police officer killed a Black man, George Floyd. Jackson urged police reform and also called for “an economic, health care and housing revolution in the Black community.”

Nationally, Jackson was arrested several times in 2021 during protests aimed at persuading Congress to end the federal legislative filibuster and pass voting rights legislation.

“Times change, but some values don’t change,” he told the Tribune in 2021. “I’ve spent my time trying to build up, and I want God to be pleased with my work.”

Jackson stepped down as president of Rainbow/PUSH in 2023, ceding the reins to a Dallas pastor who left less than a year later. Jackson was honored by delegates at the August 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Mayor Brandon Johnson gave him a key to the city in October 2024.

In February 2025, Jackson, transported in a wheelchair, visited the restored A.G. Gaston Motel in Birmingham, Ala., the historic building that once housed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Survivors include Jackson’s wife; three daughters, Santita, Jackie and Ashley; and three sons, Jesse Jr., Jonathan and Yusef.

Information on services is pending.

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