'Not simply a civil rights movement unto himself'

Fellow civil rights activist the Rev Al Sharpton said his mentor “was not simply a civil rights leader; he was a movement unto himself.”

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“He taught me that protest must have purpose, that faith must have feet, and that justice is not seasonal, it is daily work,” Sharpton wrote in a statement, adding that Jackson taught “trying is as important as triumph. That you do not wait for the dream to come true; you work to make it real.”

“I get very emotional knowing that these speeches belong to the ages now,” his son, Jesse Jackson Jr, told the AP in October.

Jesse Louis Jackson was born on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, the son of high school student Helen Burns and Noah Louis Robinson, a married man who lived next door.

Jackson was later adopted by Charles Henry Jackson, who married his mother.

Jackson was a star quarterback on the football team at Sterling High School in Greenville, and accepted a football scholarship from the University of Illinois.

But after he reportedly was told Black people couldn’t play quarterback, he transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he became the first-string quarterback, an honour student in sociology and economics, and student body president.

Arriving on the historically Black campus in 1960 just months after students there launched sit-ins at a whites-only lunch counter, Jackson immersed himself in the blossoming Civil Rights Movement.

By 1965, he joined the voting rights march King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

King dispatched him to Chicago to launch Operation Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference effort to pressure companies to hire Black workers.

Jackson called his time with King “a phenomenal four years of work.”

Jackson was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was slain. Jackson's account of the assassination was that King died in his arms.