Rev. Jesse Jackson, a minister and civil rights leader who twice ran for president, died on February 17. Born on October 8, 1941, he helped organize protests in the 1960s alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., backed voting rights and a higher minimum wage, and
Rev. Jesse Jackson didn’t just speak about change—he spent much of his life pushing for it, even when the country fought back.
He died on February 17. His story stretches from the Jim Crow era—where segregation on public buses and at school shaped his childhood—to the national stage, where he ran for president twice as a Democrat and became the most successful presidential nominee among Black candidates before Barack Obama.
Born on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson’s early life was marked by firsthand exposure to Jim Crow segregation. That experience didn’t fade; it set the tone for everything that followed. His fight for civil rights began in the 1960s. when he helped organize protests and demonstrations across the US and worked closely alongside civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Across decades, Jackson remained a leading civil rights activist. His work included support for modern national movements such as the push for voting rights. the fight against racism. and a higher minimum wage. It was a political and moral agenda that kept widening, even as the battles around him changed.
Jackson sought the presidency twice—both times as a Democrat. In 1984, he placed third for the party’s nomination. In 1988, he placed second. Those runs became a benchmark: the most successful presidential candidacies of any Black candidate prior to Barack Obama.
His later years carried a different kind of struggle. In 2017, Jackson announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Then, in November 2025, he was treated in a Chicago hospital after complications from progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), a rare neurodegenerative condition.
Taken together, the timeline reads like a life measured by both urgency and endurance: civil rights organizing in the 1960s, presidential bids in the 1980s, and a long final stretch defined by serious neurological illness—ending with his death on February 17.
Whether in protest lines or election politics, Jackson’s influence followed a consistent thread: a refusal to accept limits on who could belong in the promise of the United States.
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