Jesse Jackson, icon of the civil rights movement in the United States, dies at 84

Jesse Jackson, a historic leader and icon of the civil rights movement in the United States, has died at the age of 84. Jackson, a collaborator of Martin Luther KingHe was a prominent member of the movement and founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Twice, in 1984 and 1988, he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, becoming the first African American with a realistic chance of being a candidate in a national election. Jackson, a Baptist minister, grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, a southern state during the height of racial segregation. His death was announced by his family on Tuesday: "Our father was a leader and a servant, not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the forgotten throughout the world," they said in a statement. "We shared him with the world, and the world became part of our extended family. His unwavering faith in justice, equality, and love uplifted millions, and we ask that you honor his memory by continuing the fight for the values ​​he championed." Jackson, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, was hospitalized in November after more than a decade of paralysis that affected his ability to walk and swallow.

The activist participated in the legendary Selma march For the rights of the black population, he faced the wrath of the segregationists and accompanied Martin Luther King in the final moments. The New York Times He describes him as the most influential figure in the Black community in the country during the period between Martin Luther King's civil rights struggle and Barack Obama's election as president in 2008. Jackson took over from King after his assassination in 1968, although "he never achieved either King's dominant moral status or American triumph."

The son of a teenage single mother, Jackson grew up in a small, segregated Black community. After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on the South Side of Chicago on a football scholarship. Chicago became his home base for the next few years. In 1984, he decided to run for president, becoming only the second Black man to do so—after Shirley Chisholm, who had run twelve years earlier—and created the National Rainbow Coalition as his campaign vehicle, an organization that later became the current Rainbow PUSH Coalition. At that time, he finished third in the Democratic primaries. Four years later, he ran again and came much closer to winning, but party leaders opted for a less risky alternative. When Bill Clinton won the presidential election in 1992, he appointed Jackson special envoy to Africa and awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. In 2017, at the age of 76, he announced his Parkinson's diagnosis and his intention to step back from frontline work. However, he maintained his activism in the following years. In 2020, he condemned the police killing of George Floyd and supported the Black Lives Matter protests, and in 2021, he was among the activists arrested in Washington, D.C., during a protest against voting restrictions imposed by the Republican Party. Last year, it was announced that he was suffering from another particularly serious neurodegenerative disease, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), for which he was hospitalized last November.