A historic force to be reckoned with, a giant to be mourned. Our panel pays tribute to the Rev Jesse Jackson
Civil rights leader, politician, campaigner; Jackson was a phenomenal orator, and a brilliant organiser. Writers reflect on his impact around the world
My friend Jesse Jackson made people feel seen, heard and valued
Is it even possible to convey the vastness of a person’s life, both on a personal level and on a global public stage? Probably not. But what I can offer is a snapshot through my own lens: as a friend, a mentee and a collaborator on Operation Black Vote.
Like many people, my first image of the Rev Jesse Jackson was that historic photograph taken in Memphis in 1968, pointing toward the direction of the gunman who had just assassinated his mentor, the civil rights icon Martin Luther King. That moment fixed him in history. Fast forward two decades and he reappeared in the global consciousness as the fast-talking, big-afro presidential candidate of 1984 and 1988, proudly proclaiming that Black was beautiful while building one of the most diverse political coalitions the US had ever seen.
His charisma was undeniable, but it was his pulpit oratory that truly set him apart. “Say after me: I am somebody. I am somebody.” And then, the line that would echo across generations: “Keep hope alive.” Years later, he told me that sometimes when you lose, or think you have lost, you have in fact won – because you have paved the way for others to follow. In running for president, he became one of the most recognisable Americans on the planet. To Black communities across the world, he became our hero.
I had to wait more than a decade after his presidential campaigns before I finally met him, at the 2001 State of the Black World conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Great African-American leaders such as the congresswoman Maxine Waters and the Rev Al Sharpton spoke before me. I joked that the brothers and sisters back home would never believe Sharpton and Jackson were my warm-up acts.
Jackson approached me afterwards. “I like your style and your hustle,” he said. “How can I help?” And help he did. Over the next two decades he visited Operation Black Vote campaign events in the UK more than a dozen times. “What do you want me to say, Brother Woolley?” he would ask. “How do we move the dial here?”
Voter registration and political representation were, and remain, our calling cards. Together we helped register tens of thousands of Black and minority voters across Britain. We crisscrossed the country campaigning, he the mentor and I the eager student. I watched how he acknowledged the unseen helpers in every room, sometimes spending 10 minutes thanking volunteers one by one. People felt seen, heard and valued. He rarely relied on a prepared script, but his team would surround him with pages of facts. He believed charisma should be matched with evidence.
Visiting him during the Congressional Black Caucus gatherings in Washington DC felt like travelling with royalty. Black royalty. If he was a major figure in Britain, in the US you truly grasped at what he meant to Black America. He was its standard-bearer for social and racial justice.
His influence stretched far beyond the US and the UK. Across Africa he was revered as a global freedom fighter. One of his final international trips was to Paris in 2021, where the president, Emmanuel Macron, awarded him France’s highest honour at the Élysée Palace. What was scheduled as a short ceremony lasted hours; Macron simply wanted to spend time with him. The following day he invited Jackson for a private visit to the Eiffel Tower.
Jackson’s final overseas visit, however, was deeply personal for me. It was to Homerton College, Cambridge, where I had the privilege, as the mentee, of bestowing upon the mentor an honorary fellowship. It is a moment I will never forget.
In today’s fast moving, social-media-driven world of instant fame and fleeting attention, it is hard to imagine who the public icons of tomorrow might be. True public service often feels like a relic of another era, while cynicism and outrage dominate the spotlight.
What we have lost is not simply a campaigner, preacher, politician or civil rights leader. We have lost a giant of a man. And I have lost a friend.
Principal of Homerton College, Cambridge
‘I am somebody,’ Jackson said. He was right
To meet the Rev Jesse Jackson was to meet a colossus. He was big in aura and grand in stature. Something radiated from him like a sheen: a drive, a self assurance, a fixity of purpose. He had vision, sharp intelligence and he had craft. Oh boy, did he have craft.
There was an elongated moment in a long interview I did with him in 2007, after a day of watching him talk and meet people during a visit to the UK, when I looked down at my notepad, listening all the while to his sonorous voice. It was his private voice, quieter, shorn of the performative element that marked him in public. I looked up and saw his eyes were shut, his head had lolled: he was pretty much asleep. He knew the message he wanted to send and how to impart it. He was literally doing it in his sleep.
For those of us for whom Martin Luther King and his lieutenants were heroic figures from literary and TV history, a visit from a titan of the US civil rights movement was akin to touching the hem of a guru’s garment. He came and spoke at an all-seats-taken, queue-around-the-block event organised by Operation Black Vote. And after 10 minutes of his address, part lectern exposition, part cadence-littered sermon, the reason for much of the fuss and awe became apparent.
“I am somebody.” Shorn of context, the sentence sounds self evident, perhaps trite. Adapted from a 1950s poem by Rev William Holmes Borders Sr, Jackson made it his mantra.
When he led that chant, as he often did, in front of thousands of people, it said everything to those of us entreated by society, its leaders and its institutions to believe that we were less than somebody. “I may be poor, but I am somebody”, “I may be young, but I am somebody”, “I may have made mistakes, but I am somebody”. He did many tangible things, his Operation Push initiatives, his voter-drive campaigns, his hostage-release efforts, his presidential campaigns. But I’m not sure anything was as effective as his mass dissemination of three words that helped give dignity to a people whose lives were a relentless fight to keep it.
He was a force, not least because he joined the dots. His presidential tilts in 1984 and 1988 were never going to end in the White House, but they nonetheless had traction because he understood the overlap between racial struggles and class. He saw people, but he also saw powerful themes, of othering, of inequality, of disenfranchisement. Leaders of that stripe are most dangerous – so mourn today, because we can ill afford to lose them.
Executive editor, Guardian Opinion
I was always inspired by his courage
I first met the Rev Jesse Jackson when I was a brand new MP in the 1980s. We were to take many photographs together down the years and, to this day, there is one in pride of place in my office in parliament. Meeting Jesse for the first time was overwhelming. As most people know, he was a protege of Martin Luther King and was in the Memphis motel with him when he was murdered. He was a figure who was a link to the time of the very height of the civil rights movement.
Meeting Jesse in the flesh was no disappointment. He was tall, commanding and charismatic. The kind of man people turned to look at in the street even when they did not know who he was.
We kept in touch over 30 years. If he was in London, we would get together; if I was close by in the US, we would meet. I learned a lot from him. He was very brave and I have always tried to show a little of that courage. After all, however difficult things might be for me, I was not risking my life every day as he did. He taught me the importance of having principles and sticking to them. Above all, I learned from Jesse never to forget the importance of being a voice for the voiceless.
His organising base was in Chicago’s South Side, but he was also a great internationalist. He travelled all over the world talking about racial justice in that inimitable southern preacher’s manner. The last time I met him was in 2021 at a conference in Paris about the international fight against racism.
If any single person could be said to carry on the legacy of King, it was Jesse. There were others who kept the organisations going, spoke and campaigned. But unconstrained by a political party, he was the civil rights figure of the age. It was a privilege to have known him.
Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington
He dreamed of a genuinely leftwing alternative
The Rev Jesse Jackson was the electorally consequential figure of the US left in the long gap between the New Deal and Bernie Sanders’s emergence as a national force. Long before “democratic socialism” returned to mainstream debate, Jackson was doing the unglamorous work of building a multiracial working-class coalition – and scaring the hell out of the Democratic establishment in the process.
His 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns weren’t vanity bids. They emerged from the space that the post-1968, “new politics” movement opened up, but offered a new alternative for the left wing of the Democratic party – more rooted in black political organisation and more economically ambitious than McGovern-era liberalism ever managed to be. Jackson came out of the civil rights movement and dreamed of fully transforming a party once littered with segregationists into an American analogue for the leftwing parties of Europe. Through the Rainbow/Push Coalition, he brought together black voters, organised labour, small farmers, peace activists and others into something that looked, more than anything else in US political life, like a genuine social democratic bloc.
The programme was clear and serious. Anchored in demands such as full employment, this movement argued that the federal government should guarantee work and direct investment to abandoned communities. For Jackson, racism and economic neglect were the same problem, and the answer was public power.
The party and history chose another path. Under Clinton, Democrats embraced deregulation and third-way triangulation: tax credits and market discipline where there might have been structural reform to address the effects of deindustrialisation and urban decay.
Jackson famously clashed with Barack Obama during the latter’s 2008 presidential campaign, but he also made Obama possible. He expanded the electorate and proved that a black presidential candidate rooted in grassroots mobilisation could be a serious, national force. He also, in important ways, prefigured Sanders, an early supporter of his – the insurgent primary runs, the mass rallies, the fusion of labour demands and the language of moral urgency.
In a country where the left has spent most of its history on the margins, Jackson made it matter. He told it to keep hope alive. With the rise of figures such as Zohran Mamdani, it still does.
President of The Nation and founding editor of Jacobin
Jackson made Black history real for me
The Rev Jesse Jackson was one of those names I was aware of long before I understood why. He was simply there, part of the wider landscape of Black political life, hovering at the edge of my consciousness.
I first encountered him in a school history lesson in the early 2000s when I was about 13. The US civil rights movement was referenced briefly, almost in passing. Martin Luther King was the centrepiece, as he always is, and the lesson moved on quickly. But I went home curious.
Those were the days of dial-up internet and bulky computers, when looking something up still felt like a deliberate act. I started with King – his life, his assassination – and it was there that I came across Jackson’s name. He had been with King in Memphis on the night he was killed. That detail stayed with me.
From there, I worked backwards, delving further into Jackson’s life and discovering the wider constellation of Black thinkers, organisers and artists who shaped that era. John Lewis. James Baldwin. Lorraine Hansberry. Nina Simone. Claude McKay.
My mother had already laid some of the groundwork. Through reggae music and the striking portrait of Marcus Garvey that hung on our wall, I understood that these struggles weren’t confined to the US. It spanned continents and generations.
Jackson would then turn up elsewhere. In cartoons such as South Park and the Boondocks; on the news, crying openly the night Barack Obama was elected US president. His presence bridged worlds from his pulpit to popular culture.
For me, he represented continuity. He was proof that history wasn’t abstract or distant, but lived, felt and carried forward by real people. He connected the sacrifices of the past to the possibilities of the present, making it clear that progress doesn’t just arrive. It’s fought for, held on to and handed down.
Journalist and film-maker