UNITED States civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson has died “peacefully” at aged 84, according to his family.
“His unwavering commitment to justice, equality, and human rights helped shake a global movement for freedom and dignity,” his family 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,” the statement continued.
“We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family.”
A close associate of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr (MLK), the Baptist minister twice ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. He spent decades advocating for the rights of Black Americans and other minorities, dating back to the tumultuous 1960s civil rights movement.
He first entered the public eye as MLK’s mentee and was with MLK when he was assassinated at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.
In a 2008 interview with Al Jazeera, Jackson said MLK’s slaying “traumatised” him, and blamed the US government for sowing fears among the public against his mentor “without a foundation”.
“In spite of those odds, he lives now through his dreams in the hearts of millions of people,” Jackson said.
Born Jesse Louis Burns on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson was raised in the segregated US South and later took the name of his stepfather.
He studied sociology at the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina before joining the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights marches in 1965, where he formed a relationship with MLK.
After MLK’s death, Jackson continued his legacy by leading the Chicago-based organisation Operation PUSH, which was dedicated to improving economic, social and political conditions for Black people across the US.
He went on to form the National Rainbow Coalition, which emerged out of the first of his two unsuccessful bids for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984. The group sought equal rights and political representation for a broader array of marginalised groups, including LGBTQ+ people, and merged with Operation PUSH.
About the same time, he apologised for anti-Semitic comments he made to a Washington Post journalist, and publicly cut ties with controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
Four years later, Jackson’s speech at the Democratic National Convention became among his most famous.
“I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me. And it wasn’t born in you, and you can make it,” he said. “Wherever you are tonight, you can make it.
“Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. Don’t you surrender,” he said.
In the 1990s, Jackson increasingly turned his attention to foreign policy, serving as a presidential special envoy for Africa for Bill Clinton and becoming a prominent voice for ending apartheid in South Africa.
His travels to free American prisoners brought him to Syria, Iraq and Serbia.
In 2008, Jackson cried in the crowd as former president Barack Obama celebrated his first presidential win, calling his election “mind-boggling, mind-blowing”.
“Our children walk into a very different America tomorrow,” he told Al Jazeera at the time.
Jackson was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017 and faced severe health challenges toward the end of his life.
Still, he remained a staunch advocate for various progressive causes, including pushing for COVID-19 vaccines for Black Americans, who lagged behind their white counterparts in vaccine uptake, campaigning for an Israel-Hamas ceasefire and championing the Black Lives Matter movement.
Speaking to demonstrators in Minneapolis, Minnesota, ahead of the murder conviction of the police officer who killed George Floyd, he said: “Even if we win, it’s relief, not victory.”