US civil rights champion, Prez candidate dies

Jesse Jackson, one of the most prominent US civil rights leaders of the 20th century who ran credible campaigns for the White House two decades before America elected its first Black president, has died.

- PATRICK OSTER

He was 84.He died on Tuesday, surrounded by his family, CBS News reported, citing a statement from Jackson’s family. He disclosed in 2017 that he had Parkinson’s disease.

An acolyte of Martin Luther King Jr, Jackson was present when King was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968. “We were traumatized to see him lying there soaked in blood, 39 years old,” Jackson recalled a half-century later in an interview with the Guardian. “He'd done so much to make America better, built bridges, sacrificed his livelihood, sacrificed his life.”

“America loathes marchers but loves martyrs,” Jackson wrote. “The bullet in Memphis made Dr King a martyr for the ages.”

Though he didn’t succeed King in an official capacity, Jackson carried on King’s struggle for justice and equality in highly visible ways.

Jackson ran the Chicago office of Operation Breadbasket, the economic empowerment arm of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1971, after a break with SCLC leaders over his management style, the flamboyant Jackson, known for his soaring oratory and attraction to the spotlight, formed his own civil rights organization, People United to Serve Humanity, also called Operation PUSH.

He later created the National Rainbow Coalition, a multiracial political group, before merging the two outfits in the mid-1990s to form the Chicago-based Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a nonprofit organization that sought political and economic power for minorities. He stepped down as its president in 2023.

'Longing for Respect'