The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, a longtime civil rights leader who rose from a youthful organizing role in Chicago to become the movement’s best-known figure after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., died Tuesday in Chicago at age 84, according to a report from the Associated Press.
Jackson’s daughter, Santita Jackson, said her father died at home in Chicago, surrounded by family. The Associated Press report said Jackson had a rare neurological disorder, and that he spent his final months receiving 24-hour care, communicating with family and visitors by holding their hands and squeezing.
Jackson was drawn into the heart of the civil rights movement early. As a young organizer in Chicago, he was called to meet King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, shortly before King was killed, the AP reported, and he publicly positioned himself thereafter as King’s successor.
Throughout his later career, Jackson led a range of crusades in the United States and abroad. The AP said he advocated for the poor and underrepresented on issues including voting rights, job opportunities, education and health care, and he promoted Black pride and self-determination through the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, which he used to push corporate and public leaders toward what the report described as a more open and equitable society.
A defining feature of Jackson’s public message was a refrain he often repeated, including his declaration, “I am Somebody.” The AP report said Jackson used that line in a poem that emphasized dignity even amid poverty or welfare, and that he took the message literally as he rose from obscurity in the segregated South to national prominence.
In a statement posted online, the Jackson family described him as “a servant leader” and said, “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family.” Fellow civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton said Jackson “was not simply a civil rights leader; he was a movement unto himself,” adding that Jackson taught him that “protest must have purpose,” “faith must have feet,” and that “justice is not seasonal, it is daily work.”
Even after health challenges limited his ability to move and speak, Jackson remained active in public life. The AP reported that he continued protesting into the era of Black Lives Matter, including appearing in 2024 at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and at a City Council meeting to show support for a resolution backing a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
The AP report also highlighted Jackson’s remarks during a march in Minneapolis before the officer whose knee kept George Floyd from breathing was convicted of murder. Jackson told the marchers, “Even if we win, it’s relief, not victory. They’re still killing our people. Stop the violence, save the children. Keep hope alive.”
As details of his life and work unfolded in the AP report, Jackson’s biography was described as starting in Greenville, South Carolina, and moving through high school and college football before his organizing accelerated. The report said Jesse Louis Jackson was born Oct. 8, 1941, and later accepted a scholarship to the University of Illinois, before transferring to North Carolina A&T, where he became a student body president and studied sociology and economics while immersing himself in the civil rights movement after students began sit-ins at a whites-only lunch counter.
The AP report said that by 1965 Jackson joined the voting rights march King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and that King dispatched him to Chicago to help launch Operation Breadbasket, an SCLC effort intended to pressure companies to hire Black workers. It also described Jackson’s role after King’s death, including an account that King died in Jackson’s arms.
In later years, Jackson broke with SCLC to form Operation PUSH, later renamed Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the AP report said. It described the organization’s mission as ranging from diversifying workforces to registering voters, with Jackson using lawsuits and threats of boycotts, and publicly pressing corporations to spend money and commit to hiring more diverse employees.
The AP report said Jackson had five children with his wife, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, including Santita Jackson, Yusef DuBois Jackson, and Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson Jr., as well as U.S. Rep. Jonathan Luther Jackson and Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who resigned in 2012 and is seeking reelection in the 2026 midterms. The report also said Jackson was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968 and earned a master’s of divinity degree in 2000.
It described Jackson’s political ambitions as falling short but still shaping political history. The AP said Jackson ran twice for president and “did better than any Black politician had before President Barack Obama,” winning 13 primaries and caucuses for the Democratic nomination in 1988, after an earlier failed attempt. The report said he told the AP that running for president twice helped “redefine what was possible,” and that it raised “the lid for women and other people of color.”
The AP report also documented Jackson’s influence abroad and at high levels of government. It said President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000, and it described diplomatic efforts including the release of Navy Lt. Robert Goodman from Syria in 1984 and the 1990 release of more than 700 foreign women and children held after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. It also said Jackson won the freedom of three Americans imprisoned by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in 1999.
In health-related developments toward the end of his life, the AP report said doctors confirmed last year that Jackson had progressive supranuclear palsy, a life-threatening neurological disorder. It also said he had been hospitalized in November for nearly two weeks. The report said Jackson and his wife survived being hospitalized with COVID-19 during the coronavirus pandemic, and that he had urged Black people in particular to get vaccinated.
The AP report concluded by noting that the story had been corrected to show Jackson was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy last year, not this year.