The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a prominent civil rights activist for more than 50 years and a strong candidate for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, has died. He was 84 years old.

“Our father was a servant leader, not only to his family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in a statement.

“We shared him with the world, and in return the world became part of our extended family. His unwavering belief in justice, equality, and love uplifted millions of people. We ask you to honor his memory by continuing to fight for the values ​​he lived.”

The cause of death has not been disclosed.

Jackson had suffered from progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) for more than 10 years. He was originally diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He has been hospitalized twice with COVID-19 in recent years.

Jackson, a fixture in the civil rights movement and Democratic Party politics since the 1960s, was once a close friend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In an interview with the Guardian in May 2020, Jackson said: “I was a trailblazer and a wayfinder. I had to face doubts, cynicism and fear about black people running. There were black academics who were writing papers about why I was wasting my time. Even black people were saying black people can’t win.”

Twenty years after his second bid for president, Barack Obama, the first black president, paid tribute to Jackson for making his victory possible. President Obama held a celebration in Chicago, which is also Jackson’s home base.

“It was a huge moment in history,” Jackson told the Guardian 12 years later.

During the coronavirus pandemic, he campaigned against disparities in care and outcomes. ask“After 400 years of slavery, segregation, and discrimination, why would anyone be shocked that African Americans are dying disproportionately from the coronavirus?”

He also said that previous presidents have failed to “end the virus of white supremacy and solve the multifaceted problems facing African Americans.”

Born on October 8, 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson became involved in politics at an early age while moving through the segregated South. he was elected He served as class president at the all-black Sterling High School, where he also excelled in track and field. In 1959, he received a football scholarship to the University of Illinois. chicago white sox provided Young Jackson was selected to be part of the baseball team, but decided to focus on his education instead.

During winter break during her first year of college, Jackson returned to her home in Greenville and tried to get books for her studies at the whites-only Greenville Public Library, but was turned away. The experience stayed with him. A few months later, on July 16, 1960, Jackson and seven black high school students entered a Greenville library in a peaceful protest. After browsing the library and reading books, the group later green building eight They were arrested for disorderly conduct and later released on $30 bail. In the end, a judge ruled that they were entitled to a publicly funded facility, and Greenville’s library system was integrated in September 1960.

Jackson did not return to the University of Illinois after his freshman year, instead transferring to the historically black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University in Greensboro, where he played football as quarterback and served as Omega Psi Phi, a black fraternity official. elected Student council president. While earning a degree in sociology, he remained active, participating in sit-ins at restaurants in Greensboro.

“My leadership skills came from the athletic field,” Jackson said. said “In many ways, they evolved from quarterback play: evaluating the defense and motivating your team. Once the game starts, you use what you have. And you don’t cry about what you don’t have. You run to your strengths. You also practice to win.”

While in college, Jackson met his future wife, Jacqueline, and they married in 1962 and had five children: Santita, Jesse Jr., Jonathan Luther, Yusef Dubois, and Jacqueline Jr. He then had an affair with Karin Stanford in the early 2000s, with whom he had a sixth child, Ashley.

Jackson first met King, who would later become his mentor, at the Atlanta airport in the early 1960s. King had followed Jackson’s student movement from afar for several years.

In 1964, Jackson enrolled at Chicago Theological Seminary while continuing to participate in the civil rights movement. jackson traveled After seeing news footage of Bloody Sunday, when Martin Luther King Jr. led nonviolent civil rights protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, he and his classmates traveled to Selma, Alabama, to join the movement. Impressed by Jackson’s leadership in Selma, King offered him a position with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the civil rights organization he co-founded.

After several years, Jackson put his seminary studies on hold to focus on SCLC work. Operation Granaryan economic justice program that harnesses the power of the black church by calling on pastors to pressure companies to hire more black jobs through bargaining and boycotts. In 1967, Jackson became national director of Operation Breadbasket and a year later was appointed minister.

“We knew he would do a good job,” King said. said At the 1968 Breadbasket Operations Conference, he said, “But he did a better job than a good job.”

Tragedy occurred shortly after Jackson assumed a leadership position at SCLC. On April 4, 1968, Jackson witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. from below the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

This experience remained with Jackson throughout his life. “Every time I think about it, it’s like peeling a scab off a wound,” he told the Guardian in 2018. “It’s a hurtful, painful idea: that loving people should be killed by hate, that peaceful people should be killed by violence, that caring people should be killed by careless people.”

After King’s death, Jackson continued to work for SCLC until 1971, when he founded his own organization, People United to Save Humanity (Push), to improve the economic conditions of black people. The organization hosted reading programs for black youth, helped them find jobs, and encouraged companies to hire more black managers and executives.

In 1984, Jackson ran as the Democratic presidential candidate, becoming the second black person to launch a national campaign, following Shirley Chisholm more than a decade earlier.

“Tonight, we gather together in our faith in a great God, in our true respect and love for our country, and in the legacy of our great political party, the Democratic Party, which is our best hope for reorienting our nation in a more humane, just, and peaceful direction,” Jackson said. said Audience at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, California.

“This is not a perfect party. We are not a perfect people, and yet we are called to a perfect mission. Our mission is to feed the hungry, cloth the naked, house the homeless, teach the illiterate, provide jobs for the unemployed, and choose humanity over the nuclear race.” He lost the Democratic nomination to former Vice President Walter Mondale, and was ultimately won by incumbent Republican President Ronald Reagan.

After running for president for the first time, Jackson founded the National Rainbow Coalition to promote voting rights and social programs. In the mid-1990s, Jackson combined his two organizations to form the Rainbow Push Coalition, a multiracial organization focused on educational and economic equity. Over the years, the coalition has paid out more than $6 million in college scholarships and provided more than 4,000 families facing foreclosure with financial assistance to save their homes, according to their report. Website.

Jackson ran for the Democratic presidential nomination for the second time in 1988 and did well, but lost to Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, who lost in the general election to George H.W. Bush.

“I wasn’t there, but I cried thinking about the people who made it possible…The people who paid the real price: Ralph Abernathy, Dr. King, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, people who fought like hell. [at the Democratic National Convention] Participants in the Southern movement in Atlantic City in 1964. ”

In 2000, then-President Bill Clinton Award Mr. Jackson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for his decades of work focused on increasing opportunities for people of color.

Jackson carried Dr. King’s work forward and remained at the forefront of the global civil rights movement throughout a turbulent half-century of American history, culminating in the election of Donald Trump and the rise of Black Lives Matter.

“Dr. King believed in a multiracial, multicultural union of conscience, not ethnic nationalism,” Jackson said in 2018. “Dr. King felt that nationalism, whether black, white or brown, was narrowly viewed given global challenges. So having a multiracial environment said a lot about his vision for America and the world, what America and the world should represent.”

“The arc of the moral world is long, bending toward justice, but it has to be pulled to bend. It doesn’t bend automatically. Dr. King often reminded us that for every tailwind that moves a movement forward, there is always a headwind.

“In some ways, those who opposed change were reinvigorated by Trump’s demagoguery. Dr. King would have been disappointed in his victory, but he would have been psychologically prepared. He would have said, ‘We must not give in in spirit. Instead of giving in to this, we must strengthen our faith and fight back.'”