Feb 19, 2025
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365 blk!
Rev. Jesse Jackson raises a clenched fist from a police van after he and 11 others from Operation Breadbasket were arrested during a sit-in at the Atlantic Pacific Tea Co. offices in New York February 2, 1971.
Photo credit: AP Photo/Marty Lederhandler, file
Jackson's presidential runs in 1984 and 1988 played a significant role in shaping the modern Democratic Party.
Kevin Robillard at HuffPost:
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a civil rights leader who bridged the era of Martin Luther King Jr. with the modern world and whose two presidential runs in the 1980s set the stage for today’s progressive movement, died early Tuesday, his family announced. He was 84.
“Our father was a servant leader ― not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the family said in a 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.” The statement did not list a cause of death but noted that Jackson died peacefully surrounded by family. Born in segregated Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson was a prodigy who would become nationally known by his early 20s, become a controversial figure in both white and Black America by the age of 30, help resolve international crises in his 40s, host a CNN show and become a presidential confidant in his 50s, and become a respected elder statesman in the new millennium.
An electrifying speaker, Jackson could never escape the criticism that he was more flash than follow-through. Other politicians, even ideological allies, viewed him as untrustworthy and ego-driven. Conservatives argued Jackson added fuel to the fire of racial divides for his own benefit.
Electoral success eluded him — his only successful campaign was for a wholly symbolic office in Washington, D.C. But his campaigns for president in 1984 and 1988 helped create the image of what the modern Democratic Party seeks to be but rarely seems to achieve: a multiracial coalition of voters dedicated to economic fairness. “If there was no Jesse Jackson, in my view, there never would have been a President Barack Obama,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in 2020 while campaigning alongside Jackson, a man he has repeatedly cited as an inspiration. However, Jackson, who campaigned as an unflinching economic progressive and critic of American foreign policy, also set the stage for Sanders’ own runs for the presidency.
Jackson was the son of an unwed teenage mother who grew up across the street from his father’s legitimate family, a rejection that friends told reporters still stung decades later. He became class president and a star athlete in high school, and later played college football at the University of Illinois and North Carolina A&T. He graduated from the latter school in 1964 with a degree in sociology, also serving as class president there. After participating in a sit-in at a public library in Greenville while in college, he moved to Chicago to attend divinity school and become more involved in the Civil Rights Movement. He participated in marches from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama and established a branch of the King-led Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Chicago. He was later appointed to lead SCLC’s economic arm, Operation Breadbasket, which organized boycotts of businesses the organization believed did not promote economic opportunities for African Americans.
Jackson’s evident ambition and drive impressed and occasionally annoyed King, but they chafed other civil rights leaders. His actions following King’s assassination in 1963 would lead to a permanent split between him and King’s family. Jackson, who was standing below the balcony where King was shot, appeared on television the next day wearing a shirt stained with King’s blood. Other SCLC leaders were appalled, and Coretta Scott King never forgave Jackson. In 1971, Ralph Abernathy and others pushed Jackson out of SCLC leadership, even though he argued he was merely continuing King’s desire to focus on economic justice.
[...]
Conservatives and business leaders would denounce Jackson as little more than a shakedown artist, arguing the commitments he secured from companies seeking to avoid or end boycotts did more to benefit his political allies than the Black population at large. He also became a somewhat unlikely negotiator for the United States while dealing with left-wing authoritarian governments around the world: He negotiated with Syrian President Hafez al-Assad in 1983 to secure the release of an American pilot shot down over Lebanon, and with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro the next year for the release of 22 Americans held there. These bouts of international statesmanship helped set the stage for Jackson’s presidential runs in 1984 and 1988. Made during President Ronald Reagan’s administration — the peak power of the conservative movement — Jackson’s run, especially his second, would form the basis of the modern progressive movement, the earliest stirrings of progressive dissent from neoliberalism. He challenged the so-called “Atari Democrats,” young, moderate politicians like Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.
Jackson tried to escape the idea that he was a candidate specifically for Black voters, beginning to transform himself into an economic populist. He won over the Alabama state legislature, whose membership included former National Guardsmen who stared him down as a protester, with a speech railing against “Honda and Toyota, Suzuki and Yamaha, Sony and Panasonic, being unloaded at the docks and replacing Buick and Chrysler in the American market.” [...] In the 1990s, Jackson’s fame led him to host a debate show on CNN, titled “Both Sides With Jesse Jackson.” Most episodes featured two experts or politicians debating a topic, with Jackson primarily serving as moderator and often delivering an editorial comment at the end of an episode.
[...] After spending much of the 1980s working to defeat the Atari Democrats and the moderate Democratic Leadership Council, Jackson spent the 1990s advising Clinton, the DLC’s greatest success. While criticizing Clinton’s moves to reform welfare, he advised him on other issues and became a spiritual supporter in the aftermath of Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and subsequent impeachment. In 2000, Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In theory, Jackson should have had a smoother relationship with the next Democratic president, Barack Obama. The two shared a hometown in Chicago and ran in the same circles of politically influential Black leaders. Jackson’s eldest daughter was even the maid of honor at Barack and Michelle Obama’s wedding.
Civil rights activist, former CNN host, Rainbow/PUSH founder, and 2-time Democratic Presidential candidate (1984, 1988) Jesse Jackson died at the age of 84.
✊🏾 “At the end of the day, we must go forward with hope and not backward by fear and division.”~ Rev. Jesse Jackson (1941-2026) ✊🏾🇺🇸
I Am Somebody: Remembering Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., civil rights icon, spiritual leader, presidential candidate, and global advocate for justice, died on February 17, 2026, at the age of 84, surrounded by family. His passing marks the end of a generation that bridged the Civil Rights Movement and modern Black political power.
Rev. Jesse Jackson dies at 84, leaving a powerful civil rights legacy shaped by activism, politics, controversy, and “I Am Somebody.”
On this day in 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his I Have a Dream speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The Johnson Publishing Company produced this book of photographs from the march, and included the texts of the speech as well as the lyrics to “We Shall Overcome”.
Our copy of this book is in the W. Alvin Pitcher Papers. Pitcher was a professor, minister, community and social justice activist, who worked with Operation Breadbasket (an arm of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference) in the 1960s and 1970s, helping to found a cooperative house in Woodlawn that is still in existence today, and participating in a variety of community development groups into the 1990s.
DR. KING TO PRESS ANTIWAR STAND
uncredited writer, The New York Times, 24 March 1967
ATLANTA — The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. says the war in Vietnam has become the major obstacle to the civil rights movement and that he plans to take “a much stronger stand” against it.
”I feel it’s playing such havoc with our domestic programs that I’m forced into [opposing the war],” Dr. King said in an interview.
The war has shifted attention and resources from the civil rights struggle, he said, adding that he believes civil rights programs will suffer less from his actively opposing the war than from not opposing it. The criticisms, he said, “will be much less than the frustrations and anxieties we will face in not opposing it.”
Sees New Rioting Dr. King will speak at an antiwar rally in Chicago next Saturday and then join his first antiwar demonstration in New York on April 15. He said the nation and President Johnson had become obsessed with the war.
Dr. King disclosed that he recently made plans for intensive! organizing of Negro slums as a base to seek a guaranteed annual income and a nationwide campaign for economic improvement of Negroes through bargaining with major businesses.
“We have got to go all out to grapple with this economic problem,” he said, talking of his plans for the first time since finishing a book about the racial struggle. Negro slums still retain explosive conditions, he said.
“Nothing much has changed,” Dr. King said. “I’m afraid we’re going to get a repetition of last summer.”
Rioting erupted in Chicago, Cleveland, Omaha and several other cities in 1966.
Chicago again will be a target, Dr. King said, in an effort to “highlight or expose the problems of the ghettos through demonstrations.” The demonstrations will center on housing and school segregation, he said, and might include marches by Negro pupils to predominantly white schools.
Dr. King described an agreement ending demonstrations last year in Chicago as "a marvelous agreement on paper.”
“But nothing much has been done," he said. “And this only intensifies the feelings in the slums.”
Open housing was the major issue in 1966.
Dr. King said disenchantment over the war, “intolerable conditions" in the slums and white backlash against civil rights programs' were creating an atmosphere for turmoil.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he heads, decided in recent meetings to concentrate on organizing slum residents, he said.
“We are bringing in about 50 solid organizers and we are going to have a workshop within the next three weeks to train i them in the techniques of organizing," Dr. King said.
Chicago will be a primarytarget for this organizing, aimed at building “a base of power in order to bring enough pressure to bear to bring about a guaranteed annual income."
A second program, Dr King said, will seek to improve job opportunities for the Negroes through a nationwide program called “Operation Breadbasket." This program, which has worked in Atlanta and Chicago, involves bargaining with businesses for the hiring and promotion of Negroes.
Dr. King said clergymen from major cities would meet in May to set up the program. The first target, he said, probably will be a national company or product. If the bargaining efforts fail, then a boycott will be initiated, he said.
Dr. King brushed aside suggestions in recent months that the civil rights movement was dead.
“I think it is more alive than ever," he said, adding that his group’s financial support was holding up.
He also discounted harmful effects of the black power movement and of divisions among Negro leaders.
DECEMBER 27, #onthisday in 1966 (50 years ago): Jesse Jackson Sr, John Finley and members of Dr Martin Luther King Jr's Operation Breadbasket sign an agreement with the National Tea Company to provide sales to African American businesses, December 27, 1966. (Photo by Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty. @gettyimagesarchive More photos at http://www.projectgado.org/depthoffield