Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson dies aged 84

The Rev Jesse L Jackson, a protege of Martin Luther King Jr and a two-time US presidential candidate who led the civil rights movement for decades after Dr King’s assassination, has died aged 84.

Rev Jackson died on Tuesday at home and surrounded by family, his daughter, Santita Jackson, said.

As a young organiser in Chicago, Rev Jackson was called to meet Dr King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis shortly before Dr King was killed and he publicly positioned himself thereafter as Dr King’s successor.

Rev 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 channelled 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 colours.

“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,” he said.

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 Dr 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.”

Fellow civil rights leader the Rev Al Sharpton called his mentor “a consequential and transformative leader who changed this nation and the world”.

“He kept the dream alive and taught young children from broken homes, like me, that we don’t have broken spirits,” Rev Sharpton wrote on Facebook. “A giant has gone home.”

Despite profound health challenges in his final years including a rare brain disorder that affected his ability to move and speak, Rev 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.”

Rev 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.

Rev Jackson had his share of critics, both within and outside the black community. Some considered him a grandstander, too eager to seek out the spotlight.

Looking back on his life and legacy, Rev 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,” Rev 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.

Jesse Louis Jackson was born on October 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. Rev Jackson was later adopted by Charles Henry Jackson, who married his mother.

He 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 was reportedly told black people could not play quarterback, he transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he became the first-string quarterback, an honour 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, Rev Jackson immersed himself in the blossoming civil rights movement.

By 1965, he joined the voting rights march Dr King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Dr King dispatched him to Chicago to launch Operation Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference effort to pressure companies to hire black workers.

Rev Jackson called his time with Dr King “a phenomenal four years of work”.

Rev Jackson was with Dr King on April 4 1968, when the civil rights leader was killed at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Rev Jackson’s account of the assassination was that Dr King died in his arms.

With his flair for the dramatic, Rev Jackson wore a turtleneck he said was soaked with Dr 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 got Dr King’s blood on his clothing. There are no images of Rev Jackson in pictures taken shortly after the assassination.

In 1971, Rev Jackson broke with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to form Operation Push, originally named People United to Save Humanity.

The organisation based on Chicago’s South Side declared a sweeping mission, from diversifying workforces to registering voters in communities of colour nationwide. Using lawsuits and threats of boycotts, Rev Jackson pressured top corporations to spend millions and publicly commit to diversifying their workforces.

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, Jonathan Luther Jackson and Jesse L Jackson Jr, who resigned in 2012 but is seeking re-election 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.