The iconic preacher, who carried the Civil Rights ball in the media, after the loss of Martin Luther King. Jr…who ran for President twice, and continued as a voice of Black America, was 84 years old….
At the height of his influence, Rev. Jackson was widely regarded as the nation’s preeminent civil rights leader, a ubiquitous presence before the television cameras. He showed up at protests and marches across the country to champion civil rights and social justice. And when civil disorder broke out — as it did after King’s assassination in 1968 and, decades later, after the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 — he urged restraint and nonviolence.
In the late 1970s, he began to expand his activities beyond the United States. He thrust himself into Middle East peacemaking, prisoner-release efforts and the movement against apartheid in South Africa, and he was regularly seen in the company of presidents and foreign leaders.
He was ordained as a Baptist minister but never had his own church, preferring the wider stage of civil rights activism. At 6-foot-2, with the power and fluid grace of an athlete, he was a commanding presence wherever he went. As a public speaker, he was electrifying.
Rev. Jackson’s oratorical style, like the civil rights movement, was rooted in the Black churches of the South. He would begin slowly, in an almost conversational tone, and gradually build to a crescendo that left some listeners in tears….
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Like many who knew him well, Roger Wilkins found Rev. Jackson both inspiring and exasperating….
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Rev. Jackson ventured where no civil rights leader had gone before by seeking the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination. He was widely viewed as a gadfly with no chance of winning. By all accounts, his poorly funded campaign was the most chaotic and disorganized of the modern era.
He amassed more than 3 million votes during the primaries, and he took 384 delegates with him to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. From an initial field of eight candidates, he finished third in the primary campaign, behind former vice president Walter F. Mondale, the eventual nominee, and Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado.
“When they write the history of this [primary campaign], the longest chapter will be on Jackson,” Mario Cuomo, the New York governor, said to The Post at the time. “The man didn’t have two cents. He didn’t have one television or radio ad. And look what he did.”
Four years later, Rev. Jackson again sought the Democratic nomination. He was better financed and organized, and he easily improved on his 1984 results. He won about 7 million votes, including 12 percent of White voters….
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From the beginning, Rev. Jackson made clear that he did not intend to fade into the crowd….
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Rev. Jackson was born to an unwed teenage mother in the poorest section of his hometown, in the segregated South. By the time he first ran for president, at 42, he had achieved a level of distinction that eludes most people in public life: He was known simply by his first name. He was Jesse. He was somebody….
image…Rev. Jackson reacts in Chicago in 2008 after learning that Barack Obama had been elected president. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
My condolences to his family. He was a noteworthy figure in our history, although I was never a fan. Some of my earliest political memories involve discussions of his Presidential campaign and some of the things he had said.
While he currently has one son serving in Congress from Chicago, it will be worth watching if his son Jesse Jr. who served several terms in Congress, and pre-Obama was considered a future Presidential candidate, before being convicted of corruption and claiming to have a psychotic disorder that led him to commit felonies, will win a crowded Congressional primary in the neighboring district. Jesse Jr. certainly has name recognition and perhaps will generate a lot more sympathy now but is being vastly outspent in the district and is said to be running an amateurish campaign in his comeback attempt.
He had his pluses
And negatives
But a stirring speaker and man to make SURE Black Folks where NOT FORGOTTEN
Bless him….
Let’s see what Donald can say in the negative ?
Unless it was a parody, (which I doubt) I saw a post from Trump saying that Jesse Jackson was once a great admirer of his and that he had given him office space in NYC when nobody else would and thus he was the least racist President ever, and he went on to talk a lot more about himself. He then said that Jackson was a far more important person than Obama and claimed that Jackson hated Obama.
Typical Trump behavior, although we can look back to the time that Jesse Jackson was caught on camera saying he wanted to castrate Obama.
Probably from the time when Donald WAS A DEMOCRAT?
People are nothing that Jackson was once staunchly Pro-Life on abortion before running for President. Of course, Trump was once staunchly pro-choice before doing the same.
Jackson used to endorse Republicans in Cook County back in the early ’70s. A couple of years ago, he actually endorsed the gadfly Republican candidate for Cook County States’ Attorney, because he was upset his choice in the D primary lost.
As of most….
Different time make people different….They change….