Jesse Jackson, Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 84

The Rev. Jesse Jackson died on Tuesday. He was 84. His family said he "died peacefully" but did not give a cause. He had been hospitalized in November for treatment of progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), the Rainbow PUSH Coalition said, and in 2017 he had announced that he had Parkinson’s disease.

Jackson rose to national prominence after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., becoming, in many observers’ view, the nation’s most influential Black figure between Dr. King’s era and the election of Barack Obama. He ran for president twice and forged a "rainbow coalition" of poor and working-class people, urging Americans to "keep hope alive." His galvanizing convention speeches in 1984 and 1988 helped define the progressive soul of the Democratic Party in the late 20th century.

He was born Jesse Louis Burns on Oct. 8, 1941, in Greenville, S.C., the son of Helen Burns and Noah Louis Robinson, and was later adopted by Charles Jackson.

United States, Greenville, South Carolina

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