🕊️Rev. Jesse Jackson, Civil Rights Titan and Political Power Broker, Dies at 84

The two-time presidential candidate and founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition leaves behind a decades-long legacy of activism that reshaped American politics, voting rights, and economic justice.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a towering figure of the modern civil rights movement who transformed grassroots protest into national political influence, has died at the age of 84, his family confirmed Tuesday.

“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.

For more than five decades, Jackson stood at the intersection of faith, politics, and activism. Rising to prominence as a protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. during the height of the 1960s civil rights struggle, Jackson helped organize voter registration drives, economic boycotts, and mass mobilizations that pushed racial justice to the forefront of American public life.

From the Pulpit to the Political Arena

Ordained as a Baptist minister, Jackson channeled the cadence of the Black church into a brand of political advocacy that bridged civil rights and electoral politics. In 1971, he founded what would later become the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a Chicago-based organization advocating for economic inclusion, voting rights, and corporate accountability.

But it was Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 that marked a watershed moment in U.S. political history. Running as a Democrat, he built one of the most diverse coalitions ever assembled at the national level—uniting Black voters, Latino communities, labor unions, farmers, and progressive activists under what he called a “Rainbow Coalition.” His 1988 campaign won more than 6.9 million votes and multiple primaries, reshaping the Democratic Party’s electoral calculus.

Though he never secured the nomination, Jackson expanded the political imagination of what was possible for Black leadership on a national stage—decades before the election of Barack Obama.