The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who led the Civil Rights Movement for decades
after King, has died at 84
[February 17, 2026]
By SOPHIA TAREEN
CHICAGO (AP) — The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, a protege of the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate who led the Civil
Rights Movement for decades after the revered leader's assassination,
died Tuesday. He was 84.
His daughter, Santita Jackson, confirmed that Jackson died at home,
surrounded by family.
As a young organizer in Chicago, Jackson was called to meet with King at
the Lorraine Motel in Memphis shortly before King was killed and he
publicly positioned himself thereafter as King's successor.
Jackson led a lifetime of crusades in the United States and abroad,
advocating for the poor and underrepresented on issues from voting
rights and job opportunities to education and health care. He scored
diplomatic victories with world leaders, and through his Rainbow/PUSH
Coalition, he channeled cries for Black pride and self-determination
into corporate boardrooms, pressuring executives to make America a more
open and equitable society.
And when he declared, “I am Somebody,” in a poem he often repeated, he
sought to reach people of all colors. “I may be poor, but I am Somebody;
I may be young; but I am Somebody; I may be on welfare, but I am
Somebody,” Jackson intoned.
It was a message he took literally and personally, having risen from
obscurity in the segregated South to become America’s best-known civil
rights activist since King.
“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 posted online. “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.”
Despite profound health challenges in his final years including a rare
brain disorder that affected his ability to move and speak, Jackson
continued protesting against racial injustice into the era of Black
Lives Matter. 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.
“Even if we win,” he told marchers in Minneapolis before the officer
whose knee kept George Floyd from breathing was convicted of murder,
“it’s relief, not victory. They’re still killing our people. Stop the
violence, save the children. Keep hope alive.”
Calls to action, delivered in a memorable voice
Jackson’s voice, infused with the stirring cadences and powerful
insistence of the Black church, demanded attention. On the campaign
trail and elsewhere, he used rhyming and slogans such as: “Hope not
dope” and “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it then I
can achieve it,″ to deliver his messages.
Jackson had his share of critics, both within and outside of the Black
community. Some considered him a grandstander, too eager to seek out the
spotlight. Looking back on his life and legacy, Jackson told The
Associated Press in 2011 that he felt blessed to be able to continue the
service of other leaders before him and to lay a foundation for those to
come.
“A part of our life’s work was to tear down walls and build bridges, and
in a half century of work, we’ve basically torn down walls,” Jackson
said. “Sometimes when you tear down walls, you’re scarred by falling
debris, but your mission is to open up holes so others behind you can
run through.”
In his final months, as he received 24-hour care, he lost his ability to
speak, communicating with family and visitors by holding their hands and
squeezing.
“I get very emotional knowing that these speeches belong to the ages
now,” his son, Jesse Jackson Jr., told the AP in October.
A student athlete drawn to the Civil Rights Movement
Jesse Louis Jackson was born on Oct. 8, 1941, in Greenville, South
Carolina, the son of high school student Helen Burns and Noah Louis
Robinson, a married man who lived next door. Jackson was later adopted
by Charles Henry Jackson, who married his mother.
Jackson was a star quarterback on the football team at Sterling High
School in Greenville, and accepted a football scholarship from the
University of Illinois. But after he reportedly was told Black people
couldn’t play quarterback, he transferred to North Carolina A&T in
Greensboro, where he became the first-string quarterback, an honor
student in sociology and economics, and student body president.
Arriving on the historically Black campus in 1960 just months after
students there launched sit-ins at a whites-only diner, Jackson immersed
himself in the blossoming Civil Rights Movement.
By 1965, he joined the voting rights march King led from Selma to
Montgomery, Alabama. King dispatched him to Chicago to launch Operation
Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference effort to
pressure companies to hire Black workers.
Jackson called his time with King “a phenomenal four years of work.”
Jackson was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was
slain at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Jackson’s account of
the assassination was that King died in his arms.
With his flair for the dramatic, Jackson wore a turtleneck he said was
soaked with King’s blood for two days, including at a King memorial
service held by the Chicago City Council, where he said: “I come here
with a heavy heart because on my chest is the stain of blood from Dr.
King’s head.”
However, several King aides, including speechwriter Alfred Duckett,
questioned whether Jackson could have gotten King’s blood on his
clothing. There are no images of Jackson in pictures taken shortly after
the assassination.
In 1971, Jackson broke with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
to form Operation PUSH, originally named People United to Save Humanity.
The organization based on Chicago’s South Side declared a sweeping
mission, from diversifying workforces to registering voters in
communities of color nationwide. Using lawsuits and threats of boycotts,
Jackson pressured top corporations to spend millions and publicly commit
to diversifying their workforces.
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Democratic presidential primary candidate Jesse Jackson speaks to a
group of his supporters at a rally held at a Baptist Church in
Dayton, Ohio, April 14, 1984. (AP Photo/Rob Burns, File)
The constant campaigns often left his wife, Jacqueline Lavinia
Brown, the college sweetheart he married in 1963, taking the lead in
raising their five children: Santita Jackson, Yusef DuBois Jackson,
Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson Jr., and two future members of Congress,
U.S. Rep. Jonathan Luther Jackson and Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who
resigned in 2012 but is seeking reelection in the 2026 midterms.
The elder Jackson, who was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968
and earned his Master of Divinity in 2000, also acknowledged
fathering a child, Ashley Jackson, with one of his employees at
Rainbow/PUSH, Karen L. Stanford. He said he understood what it means
to be born out of wedlock and supported her emotionally and
financially.
Presidential aspirations fall short but help ‘keep hope alive’
Despite once telling a Black audience he would not run for president
“because white people are incapable of appreciating me,” Jackson ran
twice and did better than any Black politician had before President
Barack Obama, winning 13 primaries and caucuses for the Democratic
nomination in 1988, four years after his first failed attempt.
His successes left supporters chanting another Jackson slogan, “Keep
Hope Alive.”
“I was able to run for the presidency twice and redefine what was
possible; it raised the lid for women and other people of color,” he
told the AP. “Part of my job was to sow seeds of the possibilities.”
U.S. Rep. John Lewis said during a 1988 C-SPAN interview that
Jackson’s two runs for the Democratic nomination “opened some doors
that some minority person will be able to walk through and become
president.”
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.
“To be called African Americans has cultural integrity — it puts us
in our proper historical context,” Jackson said at the time. “Every
ethnic group in this country has a reference to some base, some
historical cultural base. African Americans have hit that level of
cultural maturity.”
Jackson’s words sometimes got him in trouble.
In 1984, he apologized for what he thought were private comments to
a reporter, calling New York City “Hymietown,” a derogatory
reference to its large Jewish population. And in 2008, he made
headlines when he complained that Obama was “talking down to Black
people” in comments captured by a microphone he didn’t know was on
during a break in a television taping.
Still, when Jackson joined the jubilant crowd in Chicago’s Grant
Park to greet Obama that election night, he had tears streaming down
his face.
“I wish for a moment that Dr. King or (slain civil rights leader)
Medgar Evers ... could’ve just been there for 30 seconds to see the
fruits of their labor,” he told the AP years later. “I became
overwhelmed. It was the joy and the journey.”
Exerting influence on events at home and abroad
Jackson also had influence abroad, meeting world leaders and scoring
diplomatic victories, including the release of Navy Lt. Robert
Goodman from Syria in 1984, as well as the 1990 release of more than
700 foreign women and children held after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
In 1999, he won the freedom of three Americans imprisoned by
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential
Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.
“Citizens have the right to do something or do nothing,” Jackson
said, before heading to Syria. “We choose to do something.”
In 2021, Jackson joined the parents of Ahmaud Arbery inside the
Georgia courtroom where three white men were convicted of killing
the young Black jogger. In 2022, he hand-delivered a letter to the
U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago, calling for federal charges
against former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke in the 2014
killing of Black teenager Laquan McDonald.
Jackson, who stepped down as president of Rainbow/PUSH in July 2023,
disclosed in 2017 that he had sought treatment for Parkinson’s, but
he continued to make public appearances even as the disease made it
more difficult for listeners to understand him. Earlier this year
doctors confirmed a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a
life-threatening neurological disorder. He was admitted to a
hospital in November.
During the coronavirus pandemic, he and his wife survived being
hospitalized with COVID-19. Jackson was vaccinated early, urging
Black people in particular to get protected, given their higher
risks for bad outcomes.
“It’s America’s unfinished business — we’re free, but not equal,”
Jackson told the AP. “There’s a reality check that has been brought
by the coronavirus, that exposes the weakness and the opportunity.”
___
Former Associated Press writer Karen Hawkins, who left The
Associated Press in 2012, contributed to this report. Associated
Press writer Amy Forliti in Minneapolis contributed.
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