Veteran US civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson, one of the nation’s most influential black voices, died peacefully Tuesday morning at the age of 84, his family said.
Jackson, a Baptist minister, had been a civil rights leader since the 1960s, when he marched with Martin Luther King Jr and helped fundraise for the cause.
“Our father was a servant leader – not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” Jackson’s family said. “His unwavering belief in justice, equality, and love uplifted millions, and we ask you to honour his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by.”
(FILES) Civil rights activist and Former US presidencial election candidate reverend Jesse Jackson gives a press conference after bilateral talks with Molefe Tsele, General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, in Johannesburg, 25 October 2005. Veteran US civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson died on February 17, 2026, his family said in a statement. He was 84. (AFP)
The family did not release a cause of death, but Jackson revealed in 2017 that he had the degenerative neurological disease Parkinson’s.
A dynamic orator and a successful mediator in international disputes, the long-time Baptist minister expanded the space for African Americans on the national stage for more than six decades.
Kamala Harris, the first black vice-president and loser of the 2024 election to Donald Trump, hailed Jackson as “one of America’s greatest patriots”.
Her former boss, ex-president Joe Biden, said in a statement that Jackson “believed in his bones” in the idea that all people are created equal and deserve to be treated as such.
Biden remembered Jackson as “determined and tenacious. Unafraid of the work to redeem the soul of our Nation”.
Born on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, his mother was a 16-year-old high school student and his father was a 33-year-old married man who lived next door.
His mother later married another man who adopted Jackson.
He grew up amid the Jim Crow era in the United States, the often brutally enforced web of racist laws and practices born in the South to subjugate black Americans.
He began his civil rights activism while a student at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College, and was arrested when he sought to enter a “whites-only” public library in South Carolina.
Jackson was present for many consequential moments in the long battle for racial justice in the United States, including with King in Memphis in 1968 when the civil rights leader was slain.
He founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a Chicago-based nonprofit organisation focused on social justice and political activism, in 1996
He is survived by his wife and six children.
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