Overnight Breaking: Jesse Jackson - Race Activist, Associate of Louis Farrakhan, and Democrat Politician - Dead at 84
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the racial activist whose two presidential primary runs were historic but were oft overshadowed by his conduct away from the campaign trail and pulpit, died early Tuesday morning at the age of 84.
Jackson, CNN reported, had been hospitalized for progressive supranuclear palsy, a neurological disorder.
A statement from the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, which he helped found, “died peacefully … surrounded by his family.”
“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 the statement.
“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.”
Jackson, born to an unmarried mother in Greenville, South Carolina in 1941, first came to prominence as an aide to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s.
Following King’s assassination in 1968, Jackson was seen by many as his heir apparent. “I Am Somebody,” his signature line, was often repeated or chanted during his speeches — although, as CNN noted, it “was aimed as much at himself as it was to his audience.”
The apex of Jackson’s public career came during his runs for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1984 and 1988, where he surprised many by his ability to draw white as well as black voters.
During the 1984 race, he won several contests in what was seen to be a two-man race for the future of the Democratic Party between old-school liberal and former Vice President Walter Mondale, and Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, a centrist so-called “Atari Democrat” who favored the nascent tech industry and pro-business policy.
However, Jackson became the surprise of the campaign, prevailing in several states and finishing third in delegates. In 1988, he ran again, finishing second in delegates to Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis after several candidates — including Hart and future President Joe Biden, then a Delaware senator — dropped out due to scandal. Both times, the Democratic nominee lost in a landslide to the Republican.
And, indeed, while moderate Democrats would prevail in the short-term battle for the party’s soul that followed three straight losses in the 1980s, Jackson’s politics of identity presaged where the party would go in the 21st century.
So, too, did many of the controversies that shadowed Jackson throughout his career.
In the 1984 campaign, Jackson’s association with the virulently anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, came under scrutiny. Jackson would try to distance himself from some of Farrakhan’s statements, calling them “reprehensible and morally indefensible” late in the campaign.
However, Jackson’s cause wasn’t helped by anti-Semitic remarks of his own making during the campaign; in a conversation with a Washington Post reporter, he referred to Jews as “Hymies” and the city of New York as “Hymietown.”
Farrakhan made the situation worse, tacitly threatening the Post reporter who made the comment public: “If you harm this brother [Jackson], it will be the last one you harm,” he said during a radio broadcast.
In 1988, meanwhile, Jackson’s second run was dogged by allegations that he had lied about and exaggerated his actions following King’s assassination in 1968.
His post-political career was similarly affected by controversy.
In 2001, there were revelations he had fathered a child with a former member of his staff with whom he was having an affair, just one year after then-President Bill Clinton awarded Jackson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“This is no time for evasions, denials or alibis. I fully accept responsibility and I am truly sorry for my actions,” Jackson said, according to NPR.
In 2008, meanwhile, during Barack Obama’s first candidacy for presidency, Jackson drew controversy during a hot mic moment where he said he wanted to castrate the Illinois senator for “talking down to black people.”
“I want to cut his n*** out,” he said during a Fox News appearance.
At the time, his son, former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., was a co-chair of the Obama campaign and chastised his father. Jackson Jr. — a congressman who was subsequently implicated in trying to buy Obama’s vacant Senate seat in the Ron Blagojevich scandal — would later plead guilty to spending three-quarters of a million in taxpayer funds for his own personal use in 2013 and spend 30 months in prison.
Jackson announced he had Parkinson’s disease in 2017. However, he continued to speak publicly on occasion. One of his last high-profile appearances came after Jacob Blake was shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August of 2020.
“Today, there’s a moral desert, top-down. The acid rain is coming, top-down,” Jackson said in Kenosha at the time. “That kind of moral desert hurts all of America.”
Video showed that Blake was trying to stab police at the time of his shooting and no officers were ever charged. Kenosha was engulfed in riots that were infamous called, in a CNN chyron, “fiery but mostly peaceful protests.”
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