Jesse Jackson Sr., a longtime civil rights activist who twice vied for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1980s, died February 17 at age 84.
A protégé of Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson was the founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a social justice organization, but he intertwined his advocacy with politics and diplomacy, serving as a special envoy to Africa for the Clinton administration and as a shadow senator representing Washington, DC, in the 1990s.
But before ill health prevented him, Jackson continued to appear on the front lines of causes for which he was long an advocate. In the summer of 2021, he was arrested twice outside the US Senate at rallies urging passage of voting rights legislation, led by the Poor People’s Campaign, a revival of King’s anti-poverty movement.
