Source: BBC
Jesse Jackson was a prominent civil rights campaigner who ran twice for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 1984 and 1988.
Born on 8 October 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson became involved in politics at an early age.
He rose to prominence in the 1960s as a leader in Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
He was present with King when he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.
He launched two social justice and activism organisations: Operation PUSH in 1971, and the National Rainbow Coalition a dozen years later.
Jackson remained an activist into later life, pursuing civil rights for disenfranchised groups both in the United States and abroad.
Jesse Jackson’s cause of death has not yet been confirmed, but he was hospitalised in November, and doctors said he’d been diagnosed with a degenerative condition called progressive supranuclear palsy.
In 2017, Jackson announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a progressive disorder which affects the brain, nervous system, and muscle control.
Jackson called it a “physical challenge” but continued his civil rights advocacy.
His father, Noah Lewis Robinson Sr, also had Parkinson’s and died of the disease in 1997 at the age of 88.
