SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
Jesse Jackson, a brilliant Baptist minister from the isolated South who was a close friend of Martin Luther King Jr. and half ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, passed away at the age of 84, his family announced in a statement on Tuesday.
The Jackson home said,” Our father was a slave head… not only to our home, but also to the downtrodden, the silent, and the overlooked around the world.”
Jackson, a renowned Chicagoan and author of encouraging speeches, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s condition in 2017.
The media-savvy Jackson fought for the rights of Black Americans and other marginalized communities dating back to the uprising civil rights movement in the 1960s, spearheaded by his leader King, a Baptist minister and imposing cultural activist.
Jackson withstanded a string of controversy, but he remained America’s leading legal rights determine for many years.
In his unsuccessful campaign for the Democrat presidential election in 1984 and 1988, he attracted Black voters and a lot of light progressives, but he was not the first black major party nominee for the White House. In the end, he never held an elected business.
Jackson founded the civil rights organizations Operation PUSH and the National Rainbow Coalition in Chicago, and he also served as Democrat President Bill Clinton’s special envoy to Africa in the 1990s. Additionally, Jackson was instrumental in obtaining the launch of a number of Americans and people detained abroad, including in Syria, Cuba, Iraq, and Serbia.
Mesmerizing statesmanship
In the 1980s, Jackson used his mesmerizing eloquence to further his social interests. A Black member who was as close to securing a big party nomination as Jackson did not until other Chicagoan Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008, though.
In the race for the right to experience Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan in 1984, Jackson received 3.3 million seats, or about 18 % of the votes cast. He came in third place behind eventual nominee Walter Mondale and Gary Hart. After it became known that Jackson had secretly called Jews” Hymies” and” Hymietown,” his candidacy lost momentum.
In 1988, Jackson came in a nearby following in the Democratic primary to Republican George H. W. Bush, making him a more refined and conventional candidate. Jackson won 11 state primaries and caucuses, including several in the South, and amassed 6.8 million votes, or 29 %, in nominating contests, giving the eventual Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis a run for his money.
Jackson used himself as a barrier-breaker for people of color, the downtrodden, and the useless. With a statement enacting his life history and calling on Americans to find common ground, he won the 1988 Democrat agreement.
” America is never a blanket woven from one string, one color, one cloth,” Jackson told the Atlanta delegation.
” Anywhere you are now, you can make it.” Keep your head high and push your stomach out. You are capable of making it. Maybe it’s dark, but the day arrives. Don’t you give up. Character breeds personality, personality breeds faith. Faith may ultimately hardly let up”, Jackson continued.
After exhibiting symptoms for three decades, Jackson announced in 2017 that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a movement disorder known for trembling, rigidity, and poor balance and coordination at the age of 76.
origins in the South
His father was a 33-year-old engaged man who lived next door to his mother, who was a 16-year-old high school student, and his father was a 16-year-old married man who lived next door. Eventually, his family wed a second man who came into Jackson’s life. He was raised in the United States during the Jim Crow era, a frequently cruelly enforced web of racist laws and practices created to oppress Black people.
Jackson received a sports scholarship from the University of Illinois, but he later changed to a previously Black universities because he claimed he had faced discrimination. He was detained when he attempted to enter a “whites-only” common collection in South Carolina, where he launched his civil rights activism while a student at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College.
Despite failing to student, he attended Chicago Theological Seminary and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1968.
Jackson occasionally traveled with him and served as a commander to Martin Luther King Jr., a president of civil rights. Jackson was only a surface below the scene when King was killed by a light male named James Earl Ray on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis the time. Some of King’s other coworkers were offended when Jackson claimed to have clung to the dying King’s shoulders and that he was the last person to speak, a claim that they refuted.
The enthusiastic Jackson was appointed as the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under the leadership of King, who had spearheaded the development of financial opportunities for Black communities.
In the first 1970s, Jackson broke up with Ralph Abernathy, King’s son at the SCLC, and founded his own civil rights organization, Operation PUSH, in Chicago. The National Rainbow Coalition was founded in 1984 by Jackson, whose wider agenda included both lesbian rights and women’s rights. The two companies merged in 1996. After more than five years of command and advocacy, he resigned as president of the Rainbow-PUSH Coalition in 2023.
He met his wife Jacqueline Brown while a student. They were married in 1962, and they were blessed with five kids. Jesse Jackson Jr., his brother, was elected to the US House of Representatives but later resigned and served time in prison for his role in scam. In 1999, Jackson and a woman who worked for his civil rights organizations had a girl outside of his control, which turned out to be scandalous.
Jackson was renowned for his diplomatic skills. President Ronald Reagan invited Jackson to the White House and thanked him for his “mission of mercy” after he secured the release of US naval pilot Robert Goodman Jr. in 1984. After Iraq’s war of Kuwait, Jackson met with Iraqi head Saddam Hussein in 1990 to secure the release of thousands of Americans and other individuals. He won the launch of three US soldiers held in Serbia in 1999 and lots of Caribbean and British captives from Cuban prison in 1984.
He ran a regular program on CNN between 1992 and 2000, pressed for Black financial independence, and received Clinton’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2000.
In the wake of the global racial justice activity, Jackson continued his engagement in after life, condemning the police killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans in 2020.
Reuters
