BREAKING: Jesse Jackson, Civil Rights Icon, Dies at 84

(AP Photo/Amr Alfiky)

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader and Baptist minister who carried the movement from the streets of the 1960s into two historic bids for the White House, died aged 84.

Jackson died peacefully on Tuesday surrounded by family, who said in a statement:

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.

A cause of death was not immediately given. He had been living for more than a decade with progressive supranuclear palsy and previously disclosed a Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2017.

Born Jesse Louis Burns in segregated Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941, Jackson rose from a childhood shaped by poverty and racial exclusion to become one of the most recognisable figures in American public life.

After joining Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he led Operation Breadbasket in Chicago before founding People United to Save Humanity in 1971, later merging it into the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.

As an impassioned orator Jackson cast himself as tribune for “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised,” urging Democrats to build a multiracial “rainbow coalition” of poor and working-class Americans.

At the 1984 Democratic National Convention, his address became the emotional high point of a campaign that ultimately failed to unseat former President Ronald Reagan, but helped redefine the party’s progressive wing.

Four years later, he returned to the convention stage with the refrain “Keep hope alive,” weaving his own story of poverty and abandonment into a broader call for “common ground.”

Though he never secured the Democratic nomination, Jackson’s campaigns in 1984 and 1988 marked the first time a Black candidate became a serious contender in a major party presidential race, winning millions of primary votes and multiple contests. His platform was rooted in voting rights, economic justice and influenced a generation of Democratic politics, even as party leaders balked at handing him the top of the ticket.

Over decades, he also negotiated the release of detained Americans abroad and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by former President Bill Clinton in 2000.

In his later years, as his health declined, Jackson remained a visible presence in public life. He was arrested in Washington in 2021 while protesting Republican-backed voting reforms, pressed corporations in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street over diversity and minority contracting, and joined boycotts against companies he accused of retreating from civil rights commitments.

Though he formally stepped down from leading the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in 2023, he continued to appear at rallies and voter registration drives, framing the battles over ballot access and economic inclusion as the unfinished business of the movement he had helped carry into the political mainstream.

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