Jesse Jackson

American civil rights leader

• Born: October 8, 1941
• Place of Birth: Greenville, South Carolina

Jesse Jackson became one of the most influential, eloquent, and widely known African American political leaders in the United States during the decades after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Early Life

Jesse Jackson was born in a six-room house in the textile-mill town of Greenville, South Carolina. His mother, Helen Burns, was a student at Greenville’s Sterling High School when she became pregnant with Jesse. His father, Noah Robinson, was married to another woman. The Robinsons lived next door to the Burns family. Two years after Jesse’s birth, on October 2, 1943, his mother married Charles Henry Jackson, who bestowed his last name on the boy and formally adopted him in 1957.

The young Jesse Jackson apparently learned the circumstances of his birth sometime during elementary school. Other children who had heard rumors of the small-town scandal taunted him. When Jesse was nine, Noah Robinson began seeing the boy standing in the Robinsons’ backyard, peering through a window. The hardships and insecurities did not, however, discourage Jesse. At any early age, he became a high achiever, determined to prove his own worth.

When he was nine, Jesse, whose mother and stepfather were devout Baptists, won election to the National Sunday School Convention in Charlotte, South Carolina. By the time he reached high school, his teachers knew him as a hardworking student, and he excelled at athletics. After he was graduated from Sterling High School in Greenville in 1959, Jackson won a football scholarship to the University of Illinois.

In Jackson’s freshman year, however, a white coach told him that blacks were not allowed to play quarterback for the University of Illinois team. Stung by this example of segregation outside the South, the young man transferred the next year to a black college, the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina. The decision to return to the South was fateful, since Greensboro was a center of the student sit-in movement to integrate lunch counters and other public facilities. Jackson threw himself into the movement and became known as an energetic and outspoken young civil rights activist.

Life’s Work

From his Greensboro years onward, Jackson’s life revolved around political struggles for civil rights. On June 6, 1963, he was arrested for the first time, on charges of inciting a riot while leading a demonstration in front of a municipal building. At one sit-in, he met his future wife, Jacqueline Lavinia Davis, whom he married after his graduation in 1964. He became active in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and during his last year at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, he was appointed field director of CORE’s southeastern operations.

At the same time that Jackson was deeply involved in protests and civil disobedience, he was also displaying an interest in mainstream politics. For a short time during his student days in Greensboro, he worked for North Carolina governor Terry Sanford. Sanford, recognizing the young man’s promise, sponsored him as one of the first African American delegates to the Young Democrats National Convention in Las Vegas. Electoral politics absorbed Jackson to the point that he almost entered law school at Duke University, with the goal of using legal qualifications as a political springboard. Instead, however, he decided to enter the ministry.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in sociology, Jackson enrolled in the Chicago Theological Seminary. His stay in Chicago was brief, as the call to struggle for civil rights proved to be more compelling. In 1965, he left the seminary to return south. During the celebrated march in Selma, Alabama, Jackson came to know the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Most of Jackson’s biographers have concluded that King became a revered father figure for the young man who had looked longingly through his natural father’s window. King, in turn, was impressed with his follower’s abilities.

Jackson quickly became a part of the inner circle of the organization headed by King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1966, King asked him to take over the Chicago operations of Operation Breadbasket, an SCLC-sponsored organization designed to pressure businesses into hiring African Americans. A year later, King appointed him Operation Breadbasket’s national director.

Jackson was with King in Memphis, on April 4, 1968, the day that King was assassinated. Other close associates of King have cast doubt on Jackson’s claim to have been the last one to have spoken with the dying leader. Some were also critical of Jackson’s dramatic television appearance on the Today Show, wearing a sweater that had supposedly been stained with King’s blood, immediately after King’s death.

On June 30, 1968, still without a theological degree, Jackson was ordained as a minister by two famous pastors, the Reverend Clay Evans and the Reverend C. L. Franklin. Instead of taking over a church, however, he continued to head Operation Breadbasket, although his independence brought him into conflict with the leaders of the SCLC. In particular, tensions emerged between Jackson and Ralph Abernathy, King’s successor as head of the SCLC.

On December 12, 1971, Jackson submitted a formal resignation from the SCLC and from Operation Breadbasket. At the same time, he used the personal following he had built in Operation Breadbasket to form Operation People United to Save Humanity (PUSH). PUSH was a personal power base for Jackson, but he used it to agitate for greater black employment in American businesses and to promote the economic interests of African Americans. At the same time, PUSH operated self-esteem programs for disadvantaged young blacks and encouraged them to excel academically. During the years that Jackson led PUSH, the slogan he urged young people to adopt, “I am somebody,” became a well-known motto of self-reliance.

As early as 1980, Jackson was announcing the need for an African American presidential candidate. As the nation approached the 1984 election, Jackson announced on the television program Sixty Minutes that he would run for the office. African Americans continued to be his electoral base, but he attempted to broaden his political program to include other Americans who had little power or representation in the American political system. He appealed to what he called a Rainbow Coalition that included poor people, small family farmers, gays, and others who might be sympathetic to a progressive agenda. He advocated government programs for full employment and a freeze on military spending, as well as a renewed commitment to civil rights. Thus, while conservatism had become a dominant force in American political life as President Ronald Reagan approached his second term, Jackson became a major spokesperson for liberal causes. In 1997, Operation PUSH and the National Rainbow Coalition merged to form the RainbowPUSH Coalition, dedicated to promoting civil rights and to seeking greater educational and economic equality in American society.

Jackson’s reputation, and his campaign, received a boost at the end of 1983 and the beginning of 1984. Robert Goodman, an African American military pilot, was shot down over the Syrian-controlled area of Lebanon. In December, Jackson flew to Damascus, Syria, to meet with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad. The Syrian leader arranged for Goodman’s release, and in early January, Jackson and the freed hostage flew home together.

In January, 1984, Jackson also made one of the most serious blunders of his political career. His support for the Palestine Liberation Organization and his connections to Arab nations had aroused the suspicions of some Jewish Americans. Jackson also had ties to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, whom many people accused of being anti-Semitic. During a conversation with reporters at the beginning of 1984, Jackson referred to New York City as “Hymietown,” a slang reference to the city’s large Jewish population that was widely viewed as offensive. Although he apologized for the remark, the incident contributed to tensions between Jewish people and African Americans, and many observers speculated that Jackson’s comments indicated an unspoken prejudice against Jewish people.

Although Jackson did not win the Democratic nomination, his strong showing demonstrated that an African American could compete at the highest levels of American politics. His showing in his second presidential campaign, in 1988, was stronger still. By this time, his Rainbow Coalition had become well organized. Jackson himself had also refined his positions and developed a comprehensive and consistent platform. He advocated a national health care program, an increase in the tax rate on the highest incomes, and the adoption of comparable-worth policies to combat gender inequalities in pay. Although he again failed to win the Democratic nomination, he did receive approximately 7 million out of 23 million votes cast in primaries. His strong showing helped to establish him as a national leader, not simply among African Americans but among all Americans. In the 1992 presidential election, Democratic candidate Bill Clinton actively sought Jackson’s endorsement, which Jackson withheld until the final weeks of the campaign.

Despite this delay in an endorsement, Jackson allied himself with President Clinton. In 1997, Jackson traveled to Kenya as the president’s special envoy to meet with Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi in order to promote free and fair elections in that country. Jackson met with the Clinton family and offered support and advice during the scandal over the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky in 1998. The relationship between Jackson and Clinton became somewhat more difficult in 1999, when Jackson went on his own to Yugoslavia to negotiate the release of three US servicemen who had been captured during the US involvement in fighting in Kosovo. A meeting between Jackson and then Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević was particularly embarrassing for the Clinton administration. Nevertheless, Jackson continued to have links to President Clinton, who honored the activist with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jackson’s relations with Clinton’s successor, President George W. Bush, were far less cordial. In the 2000 election, Jackson was highly critical of Republican candidate Bush. After Bush won the presidency in a narrow and controversial election, Jackson joined with others in maintaining that Bush had stolen the election and led rallies and demonstrations against the new Republican administration.

In an echo of the Lewinsky affair, Jackson became embroiled in a personal scandal of his own in 2001. He was reported to have fathered a child in the 1990s with a woman working on his staff and to have used Rainbow Coalition funds to provide payments to the mother. For a short time after this affair became public, Jackson limited his public activities. However, he soon returned to public view. Following the invasion of Iraq by the United States in 2003, Jackson became an outspoken and widely recognized opponent of the Iraq War, speaking at a mass rally against the war in Hyde Park in England.

During the 2004 election, opposition to the war intensified Jackson’s efforts to defeat President Bush. At the Democratic National Convention that year, Jackson denounced the war as a moral disgrace. After President Bush was reelected, Jackson became involved in investigating allegations that election procedures in Ohio were biased against mainly Democratic African Americans.

In addition to his efforts in electoral politics, Jackson continued to speak out on highly publicized racial issues. In 2006, he expressed sympathy for an African American woman who accused several Duke University lacrosse players of raping her, and even said that he would pay the woman’s college tuition. All charges against the players were later dropped. Jackson accepted an apology from comedian Michael Richards after Richards became infamous at the end of 2006 for using racial insults. In 2007, Jackson was prominent among the African American public figures who criticized radio personality Don Imus after Imus made racially offensive remarks about the women’s basketball team of Rutgers University.

Jackson continued to be a force for civil rights into the 2010s and 2020s, even as his advancing age began to take a toll. He was especially outspoken on the issue of alleged police brutality after a series of deadly incidents involving police and young Black men in the mid-2010s. He appeared on television to condemn the incidents and even joined protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, where eighteen-year-old Michale Brown was killed by a White Police officer in 2014.

In 2020, Jackson was again at the forefront of anger at the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed during an arrest by a White officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In a 2021 CNN article, Jackson said the groundswell of protests by both Black and White people reminded him of his own Rainbow Coalition. In 2023, Jackson stepped down as head of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, citing his declining health. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017.

Significance

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s helped secure legislation to ensure and protect basic freedoms for African Americans. Among the most important of these was the right to vote. Jackson played a large part in consolidating this achievement by acting as a symbol and voice for African American political aspirations. As the country moved to the right politically in the 1980’s, he continued to use his powerful oratory in the service of liberal causes, broadening and deepening the American political dialogue.

Jackson became a symbol of black political power, perhaps the most widely recognized African American leader since Martin Luther King, Jr. Numerous politicians, including President Clinton, sought his support, providing testimony to the importance of African Americans in the American political process. After the election of Bush in 2000, Jackson was outspoken in opposition to the Bush administration. Following the American invasion of Iraq, Jackson took a strong antiwar position.

Both Operation Breadbasket and Operation PUSH resulted in jobs and economic opportunities. The activities of the RainbowPUSH Coalition were wide-ranging and widely publicized. To all of his organizational activities, Jackson brought a moral energy that instilled a sense of self-esteem in many disadvantaged people. He directed his moral message toward young people in particular. While working to expand the opportunities available to them, he also exhorted them to make the most of the opportunities they had. In compelling speeches, he urged young people to avoid drugs and to devote themselves to academic excellence. As a result of his efforts, many were able to avoid being dragged down by the social and economic forces plaguing the inner cities.

Bibliography

Barker, Lucius J., and Ronald W. Walters, eds. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 Presidential Campaign: Challenge and Change in American Politics. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1989. Print.

Blake, John, and Suzanne Malveaux. “These Iconic Civil Rights Leaders Have Lost Most of Their Friends. But Their Hope Endures." CNN, 24 May 2021, www.cnn.com/2021/05/24/us/civil-rights-leaders-george-floyd-impact/index.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Bruns, Roger. Jesse Jackson: A Biography. Westport: Greenwood, 2005. Print.

Colton, Elizabeth O. The Jackson Phenomenon: The Man, the Power, the Message. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Print.

Dierenfield, Bruce J., and John White. A History of African-American Leadership. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print. Studies in Modern History.

Frady, Marshall. Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson. New York: Random House, 1996. Print.

Haskins, James. I Am Somebody! A Biography of Jesse Jackson. Springfield: Enslow, 1992. Print.

Hertzke, Allen D. Echoes of Discontent: Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, and the Resurgence of Populism. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1993. Print.

Lawson, Steven F. Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America since 1941. Malden: Wiley, 2015. Print.

Richmond, Todd, and Kathleen Foody. "The Rev. Jesse Jackson Steps Down as Leader of Civil Rights Group He Founded in 1971." Associated Press, 15 July 2023, apnews.com/article/jesse-jackson-rainbow-push-stepping-down-8452b3479834d1ef7acef84419575864. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Sokol, Jason. All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn. New York: Basic, 2014. Print.

Timmerman, Kenneth R. Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2002. Print.