Jesse Jackson was never just a politician. He was a presence.
News of his passing travelled not through headlines, but through memories.
The echo of a rally, the rhythm of sermons, the impassioned plea for racial equality.
Latest – tributes to civil rights leader, Jesse Jackson
Jesse Jackson at Operation PUSH headquarters in Chicago in 1988. Pic: AP
Jesse Jackson and then-Senator Barack Obama in 2007. Pic: Reuters
He first stepped into the national consciousness in the long shadow of Martin Luther King Jr.
Young, cool, sharp, ambitious, and standing on the edge of history as it happened.
King’s assassination in 1968 did more than fracture a movement; it created a leadership vacuum.
Jackson did not replace him – no one could – but he refused to let the movement fade.
In the years that followed, he transformed protest into organisation.
Operation PUSH was much more than a slogan. It was an attempt to translate street-level outrage into negotiating power.
He understood the leverage required to change what had shaped his childhood.
3 April 1968: Jesse Jackson (L) with Martin Luther King Jr (C) at the hotel in Memphis where King was shot dead a day later. Pic: AP
Journey from stand-out student
Born in Greenville, North Carolina, the son of a single, teenage mother, he grew up in a deeply segregated southern community.
But he was a stand-out student, the class president and a quarterback in the high school football team.
Jesse Jackson’s life in pictures
That won him a scholarship to the University of Illinois, from where he later transferred to North Carolina State University.
It was there, in a historically black college, that he became involved in the civil rights movement.
Jackson rose to prominence as an aide to Martin Luther King Jnr and witnessed his assassination at close quarters.
Jackson in 2021. Pic: Reuters
He inherited the mantle to some extent, becoming a visible advocate for racial equality.
His National Rainbow Coalition became a voice for the voiceless – black Americans, women, the LGB community, Native Americans and Hispanics.
Shifting tectonic plates of US politics
He had much more than political aspirations. He had the courage to stand for president.
Listening to his electrifying campaign speeches in 1984 and 1988, you could sense the tectonic plates of American political identity shifting.
Those campaigns were less about electoral maths and more about psychological geography – redrawing the boundaries of belonging.
It unquestionably paved the way to the eventual election of Barack Obama as president and Kamala Harris as vice president.
Jesse Jackson and Muhammad Ali in Los Angeles in 2005. Pic: AP
Jesse Jackson with former US president Jimmy Carter in 1987. Pic: AP
His relationship with Mr Obama was complicated, Jackson once accusing him of “talking down” to black audiences during his campaign.
It revealed a philosophical divide: Jackson’s politics were rooted in prophetic confrontation, while Mr Obama was more focused on coalition building.
In later years, illness narrowed his physical world, but his symbolic presence remained.
A living archive
A living archive of the struggle – one of the last towering figures whose political instincts were forged in the marches and jail cells of the 1960s.
The architecture of segregation has largely fallen, but the patterns it produced remain stubbornly intact.
But right to the end, Jesse Jackson refused to be quiet, and that is his legacy.
In a polarised nation often tempted by amnesia, he insisted on memory.
The refusal to forget watching white children take the bus to school while he had to walk.
