US civil rights leader Jesse Jackson has died at the age of 84
Jackson died peacefully on Tuesday morning, surrounded by his family, the family said in a statement
“Our father was a servant leader, not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family say
Jackson fought for civil rights alongside Martin Luther King Jr in the 1960s and was twice a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988
A protege of King’s, Jackson built a career around working to politically organise and improve the lives of African-Americans, and became a national force during his two White House campaigns.
He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017 and was hospitalised for observation last November after being diagnosed with a degenerative condition.
Bonnie Greer, the American-British playwright and author, has called Jesse Jackson “a great man”.
“The ranks are dwindling, unfortunately,” she tells BBC News.
“He was like a big brother to my generation. We were the children of the civil rights generation,” she says.
Greer said Jackson acted as a “bridge” between generations of the civil rights movement.
“He kind of interpreted us to them,” she says, adding that “he was a figure that we don’t have any more.
“He was a man who was able to see the big picture, he was able to see the little picture, he was able to put them together to make the idea of America and the world into what he saw, a world where people can not only be equal, they can get better at being equal.”
Read also:
- US Airstrikes in Nigeria: Examining strike on Sokoto, claims of it being Terrorism’s headquarters
- UPDATE: U.S. Airstrike in Nigeria eliminates multiple ISIS Terrorists with no reported civilian casualties
- FG confirms US Airstrikes on terror hideouts in Northwest Nigeria, cites deep intelligence alliance with Washington
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 that 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.
