American civil rights activist, Baptist minster, and former Washington, D.C. Shadow Senator Jesse Jackson died earlier today at his home in Chicago. He had recently suffered from Parkinson's disease and progressive supranuclear palsy. He was 84.
Jesse Louis Burns was born in Greenville, South Carolina to an 18-year-old high school student named Helen Burns and her 33-year-old neighbor Noah Louis Robinson. A year later, she married post office maintenance worker Charles Henry Jackson, who adopted her young son. Under Jim Crow laws, he used segregated water fountains and sat at the back of buses, conditions that he tolerated until the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. Jesse Jackson attended a segregated high school in Greenville, where he was elected class president and lettered in three sports. He turned down a minor league baseball contract, choosing to play football at the University of Illinois, and later transferred to North Carolina A& T, where he played quarterback and was elected student body president.
In 1965, Jackson got involved in the Selma to Montgomery marches, which were organized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders. King gave Jackson a role in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, later giving his the task of establishing an office for the organization in Chicago. Jackson was in a parking lot at the hotel in Memphis, Tennessee when King was assassinated. In 1971, Jackson founded Operation PUSH, "PUSH" being an acronym for "People United to Save Humanity". (Later, he changed "Save" to "Serve".) In 1984, he organized the Rainbow Coalition and resigned as president of PUSH to run for president of the United States. He finished third that year in the Democratic primaries and convention to former Vice President Walter Mondale and second to former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in 1988. In 1991, Jackson ran successfully for the post of "shadow Senator" for the District of Columbia, serving until 1997. He declined to run for president in more recent elections, instead mostly supporting Democratic candidates. Eventually, Operation PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition were merged into a single organization.
Jackson married Jacqueline Lavinia Brown in 1962. They had five children. He also had a daughter from an affair with a staffer, which prompted him to temporarily withdraw from his activism. He is survived by his wife and children.
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