The Obituary of Jesse Jackson in the Telegraph

The Reverend Jesse Jackson, who has died aged 84, was a champion of black consciousness in America and the first black candidate in history to make a bid for the White House.

From the early 1970s onwards, Jackson played a leading role in virtually every campaign for civil rights, sexual and racial equality, and economic and social justice. One of America’s best known public figures, he was called the “conscience of the nation” and “the great unifier” .

Yet he never held public office. From his platform as head of the Rainbow PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) organisation, which he founded in 1971, he launched two attempts to win the Democratic presidential nomination, in 1984 and 1988, basing his support on the black Americans who constituted 12 per cent of the population.

Though he was unsuccessful on both occasions, his success in garnering votes (he won three and a half million votes during the 1984 campaign and seven million in 1988) established him as a formidable, if not always welcome, power broker in the Democratic machine – unelectable, but impossible to ignore. Since 1944 the Democratic Party had only won one election – in 1964 – with a majority of the white vote.

Jackson first came to public attention in 1968, the day after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, when he appeared in a shirt soaked in what he claimed was the blood of the slain leader whose head he had cradled as he lay dying. Other King associates disputed Jackson’s account and some even went so far as to suggest he had deliberately smeared himself with blood to seize King’s mantle.

If that was his intention, then he succeeded. The incident elevated Jackson to the position of civil rights celebrity and during the 1970s, as head of the PUSH organisation, he was always at the forefront of civil rights campaigns. He had an astounding talent for publicity, calling editors in the middle of the night and recording interviews with radio stations before his colleagues had woken up, always with an ear for the perfect soundbite.

Words came easily to Jackson. Even in private, his cadences of speech, skilful use of metaphor, alliteration and other flourishes were gripping stuff, though he could sometimes seem rather lacking in warmth. As an orator he had the power to raise political discourse to lyric narrative and inspire his audiences to tears, cheers and chants. In the style of a Baptist revivalist preacher he would punctuate his text with mantras and rhymes that he would make his audience incant – his favourite being “respect me, protect me, never neglect me. I am somebody.”

Outside the US, Jackson was treated with the pomp and ceremony due to a head of state, but within he was treated with more suspicion. Critics often accused him of being little more than a cheerleader of causes, his oratory mere “jive talk”, and of being obsessed with his own self-aggrandisement. He ran his Rainbow PUSH organisation as an autocrat, never attempting to build it into the grassroots movement many wanted it to become, and behaving in an imperious and hectoring manner towards his staff. One commentator described the organisation as little more than “a rubber stamp, a letterhead for his mercurial ambition”.

Yet in his own way Jackson gave his people leadership and made them count as a force in American politics. In the process, he became a powerful figurehead for the poor and oppressed far beyond the shores of America.

Jesse Louis Jackson was born on October 8 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, in a South of poverty, segregation and lynching. His mother, Helen Burn, was an unmarried black teenager. His father, Noah Robinson, a cotton worker, was married and lived next door. When Jesse was two, his mother married a postal worker, Charles Jackson, who adopted the boy in 1957.

Life was hard: the family lived in a three-bedroomed shack with a tin roof and no running water. “People ask, ‘Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?’” Jackson remarked in 1984. “They’d never seen the house I’m running from.”

By his teens, he had developed into a tall and promising all-round athlete. From Sterling High School in Greenville, he won a football scholarship to the University of Illinois. A lightning quarterback, he assumed he should have no trouble getting into the university team. He soon discovered, however, that blacks were only allowed on to the pitch as linemen.

In disgust, Jackson left the university after a year and won a place at the all-black Carolina Agricultural and Technical State College in Greensboro. There he shone as a quarterback, excelled in economics and sociology, and was elected president of the students’ union. He also met his future wife, Jackie Brown; they married in 1962.

At 22 he achieved his first civil rights success when he organised picket lines and sit-ins at local restaurants, hotels and theatres that banned blacks, persuading many of them to lift the colour bar. After he graduated in 1964, Jackson spent nearly three years at the Chicago Theological Seminary but left just before graduating to work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) of the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King.

King chose Jackson to organise the Chicago campaign of Operation Breadbasket, a programme of demonstrations designed to secure more jobs for blacks and tear down colour bars. Employing the picket line and the boycott, Jackson scored a number of successes, including persuading a supermarket to employ 250 more black workers and stock 25 brands of black-made goods. He impressed his colleagues in the movement with his energy as much as he irritated them with his personal publicity-seeking.

Following King’s assassination in Memphis on April 4 1968, Jackson’s claims to have been with King when he died were hotly disputed by the other men present, who unanimously agreed that Jackson had been in the parking lot outside when King was shot, and had neither climbed the steps to the balcony afterwards nor gone to the hospital with King.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the image of Jackson and his bloody shirt brought the horror of the assassination home to the American public, and it was Jackson, not Ralph Abernathy, King’s preferred successor, who was anointed by the media. In 1971 Jackson was suspended from the SCLC after its leaders claimed that he was using the organisation to further his own personal agenda.

Jackson had been ordained a Baptist minister in 1968, and after being suspended from the SCLC he founded PUSH – in effect his own version of Operation Breadbasket. Standing in front of a picture of Dr King, Jackson promised to begin “a rainbow coalition of blacks and whites gathered together to push for a greater share of economic and political power for all poor people in America”.

Bankrolled by a mixture of government grants, donations from black businesses and individuals such as Hugh Hefner, the Playboy magnate, for 10 years Jackson criss-crossed the country, speaking out against racism, militarism and class divisions in America. He became a household name with his slogan “I Am Somebody”.

In 1976 he started PUSH Excel (PUSH for Excellence) to counter drugs, teenage pregnancy, vandalism and truancy. The Ford Foundation pumped more than £125,000 into the crusade, which Jackson led by going into urban schools to preach the necessity of hard work and responsibility. “You’re not a man because you can kill somebody,” he told them. “You are not a man because you can make a baby… You’re a man only if you can raise a baby, protect a baby and provide for a baby.” Within a year, nine cities had signed up to his campaign and truancy had dropped dramatically.

By now, Jackson had become a national figure and had begun to want to extend his influence elsewhere. A long-time opponent of the apartheid regime in South Africa, at President Carter’s invitation he visited the country in 1979. Huge crowds of black South Africans flocked to hear him denounce the evils of apartheid and call for a campaign of civil disobedience against the racial laws of the Pretoria government.

From South Africa, Jackson visited the Middle East, where he demanded international recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, publicly embraced Yasser Arafat and accepted donations from the Arab League for PUSH Excel. Jackson’s embrace of a man considered a terrorist by the American government created a storm and brought him the enmity of America’s powerful Jewish lobby. Yet these international excursions only increased Jackson’s fame and popularity within the black community.

His power base allowed him to influence both local and national elections. Possibly the most important campaign in which he was involved was the election victory of the first black mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington, in 1983. Washington’s victory was attributed in part to Jackson’s ability to convince more than 100,000 blacks, many of them youths, to register to vote.

In 1983 he declared himself a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination to the 1984 presidential election. His campaign centred on a platform of social programmes for the poor and disabled and improved civil rights for blacks, poor whites, immigrants, homosexuals, native Americans and women.

In January 1984 he gained valuable publicity when, after a personal appeal to President Assad of Syria, he succeeded in obtaining the release of an American Navy pilot, Lt Robert Goodman, who had been shot down over Lebanon the previous month. Not long after he was successful in securing the release of 22 Americans and 26 Cuban political prisoners from Fidel Castro’s jails.

His support for Arab nations provoked much criticism from Jewish voters and their hostility to Jackson became even more intense when he was reported as having referred to New York as “Hymietown”. Though Jackson made an impressive showing, he failed to win enough support, mainly because it was felt he would divide the Democrats and give the Republicans easy victory. The Democratic nomination went to Walter Mondale.

After the 1984 election, in which Ronald Reagan triumphed over Mondale, Jackson founded a new National Rainbow Coalition based in Washington, a grouping of blacks, Indians, poor whites and others seeking a political sanctuary and described as a “force for reform” within the Democratic Party.

The Rainbow Coalition (which later merged with PUSH) provided Jackson with a broader platform of support from which to mount his 1988 presidential bid, and to begin with he was the front-runner of the seven serious contenders for the Democratic nomination. In the end, though, he finished second to the Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, who lost to Reagan’s vice-president, George HW Bush, in the general election.

In 1990, Jackson was named one of two “shadow senators” to Congress from Washington to press for the district’s statehood. Although the idea fizzled out, it helped to keep Jackson in the public eye. In September 1990, he succeeded in winning the release of hundreds of foreign nationals being held in Kuwait by Saddam Hussein.

In the 1992 presidential campaign Jackson used his influence to persuade black voters to support Bill Clinton, helping to return a Democrat to the White House for the first time in 12 years. After the election, however, Jackson found himself being cold-shouldered by the White House.

But in 1997, when Clinton was forced to admit having lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, the President sought Jackson’s counsel as a sort of confessor and spin-doctor. The price tag was Jackson’s appointment as “special ambassador” to Africa – and a promise of a slice of the national budget for his causes. Over the next few months, Jackson paid two visits to Kenya to promote peaceful national elections and help to defuse ethnic tensions.

In April 1999, however, during the Kosovo war, he left for Belgrade to negotiate with President Slobodan Milosevic for the release of three American POWs captured on the Macedonia border while patrolling with a UN peacekeeping unit. After his meeting with Milosevic (who agreed to release the three men), Jackson urged Nato officials and Milosevic to “choose the bargaining table over the battlefield”. Jackson’s intervention provoked a furious outburst from Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who accused him of enhancing the Yugoslavian president’s position, thereby harming American efforts to end the war.

Having endorsed Barack Obama, then criticised him during his presidential campaign for “acting like he’s white”, on the night of Obama’s eventual victory in 2008 Jackson was moved to tears.

Jesse Jackson’s books included Straight from the Heart (1987), A Time to Speak (1988), Legal Lynching (1996) and It’s About the Money! (2003).

He married Jacqueline Brown in 1962. They had two daughters and three sons, of whom one, Jesse Jackson Jr, was a congressman for Illinois (1995-2012). Throughout their marriage there were rumours of affairs, and in 2001, in response to tabloid newspaper reports, Jackson issued a statement admitting that he had fathered a daughter, born in 1999, with a former staff member of his Rainbow Alliance. Five days earlier he had declared “a week of moral outrage” in protest at George W Bush’s “illegitimate” election.

For more than a decade he had suffered from the neurodegenerative disorder Progressive Supranuclear Palsy.

The Rev Jesse Jackson, born October 8 1941, died February 17 2026