THE NEW YORK TIMES: An impassioned orator, he was a moral and political force, forming a “rainbow coalition” of poor and working-class people and seeking the presidency. His mission, he said, was “to transform the mind of America.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose impassioned oratory and populist vision of a “rainbow coalition” of the poor and forgotten made him the nation’s most influential Black figure in the years between the civil rights crusades of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the election of Barack Obama, died on Tuesday at his home in Chicago. He was 84.
His death was confirmed by his family in a statement, which said that Mr. Jackson “died peacefully” but did not give a cause.
Mr. Jackson was hospitalized in November for treatment of a rare and particularly severe neurodegenerative condition, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), according to the advocacy organization he founded, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. In 2017, he announced that he had Parkinson’s disease, which in its early stages can produce similar effects on bodily movements and speech.
Mr. Jackson picked up the mantle of Dr. King after his assassination in 1968 and ran for president twice, long before Mr. Obama’s election in 2008. But he never achieved either the commanding moral stature of Dr. King or the ultimate political triumph attained by Mr. Obama.
Instead, through the power of his language and his preternatural energy and ambition, he became a moral and political force in a racially ambiguous era, when Jim Crow was still a vivid memory and Black political power more an aspiration than a reality. » | Peter Applebome | Peter Applebome is a former national correspondent and Atlanta bureau chief for The Times. | Tuesday, February 17, 2026
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