Longtime civil rights leader and sometime presidential candidate Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., died early today at the age of 84. He was also the founder of the Rainbow Coalition and Operation P.U.S.H., later consolidated, and was heavily involved in Chicago issues.
Jackson was known as a very good orator. My mother loved his speeches back when he was running for president in 1984 and in 1988. He didn't have a reasonable shot at the nomination either time, but he made his mark.
As a young man, he was an associate of Martin Luther King, Jr.; however, there was some controversy over claims he made over the day King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. He, like King and other associates, was at the Loraine Hotel at the time of the murder.
Jackson's cause of death wasn't disclosed, but he had been afflicted with progressive supranuclear palsy, a neurological disorder. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson's prior, but it wasn't the cause of his health issues.
Snip:
Jackson was born Oct. 8, 1941, in a tiny house in Greenville, S.C., where he began his lifelong work fighting for civil rights.
While visiting home for Christmas break during his freshman year at the University of Illinois, Jackson needed to borrow a book but couldn't get it from the town's white-only library. Six months later, on July 16, 1960, he and seven other students held a sit-in at the library and were arrested for protesting. After his experience as a member of the "Greenville Eight," Jackson transferred to North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College, a historically Black school in Greensboro, N.C.
His burgeoning activism would bring him in 1965 to march alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and others in Selma, Ala., answering King's call for supporters of a local voting rights campaign. Jackson became a close ally of King — eventually leaving his graduate studies at the Chicago Theological Seminary to join King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He became the Chicago coordinator and a year later, in 1967, the national leader of the SCLC's Operation Breadbasket, which was dedicated to improving the economic conditions of Black communities in the U.S.
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