Jesse Jackson, Charismatic Champion of Civil Rights, Dies at 84

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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World Leaders Back Campaign to Drop Sudanese Woman's Death Sentence

Daniel Wani married his wife Meriam in 2011 but the court
ruled the union invalid and found Ibrahim guilty of adultery.

THE GUARDIAN: British PM David Cameron and US activist Jesse Jackson speak out against death row detention of Meriam Ibrahim

World leaders have added their voices to the campaign to lift the death sentence given to Meriam Ibrahim, a Sudanese woman sentenced to hang for apostasy. They join her husband, Daniel Wani, in calling for the sentence to be dropped.

The British prime minister, David Cameron, and the US civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson were among those to speak out after Wani appealed for international support to free his wife from death row, where she is being held with her two young children after giving birth in shackles this week.

Cameron said he was "absolutely appalled" when he heard of the decision. "The way she is being treated is barbaric and has no place in today's world. Religious freedom is an absolute, fundamental human right."

His words were echoed by the Labour and Lib Dem leaders, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, and the former prime minister Tony Blair described the sentence as a "brutal and sickening distortion of faith". » | Harriet Sgerwood | Saturday, May 31, 2014

Jesse Jackson on Obama’s America
Photo of Barack Hussein Obama courtesy of Google Images
NEW YORK POST: Evian, France - PREPARE for a new America: That's the message that the Rev. Jesse Jackson conveyed to participants in the first World Policy Forum, held at this French lakeside resort last week.

He promised "fundamental changes" in US foreign policy - saying America must "heal wounds" it has caused to other nations, revive its alliances and apologize for the "arrogance of the Bush administration."

The most important change would occur in the Middle East, where "decades of putting Israel's interests first" would end.
Jackson believes that, although "Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades" remain strong, they'll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House.

"Obama is about change," Jackson told me in a wide-ranging conversation. "And the change that Obama promises is not limited to what we do in America itself. It is a change of the way America looks at the world and its place in it." The O Jesse Knows: Jackson on Obama’s America >>> Amir Taheri | October 14, 2008

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