The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., one of the most enduring architects of the modern freedom struggle, has been hospitalized, as confirmed by Rainbow PUSH Coalition officials, and is under observation for progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurodegenerative disease he has battled quietly for more than a decade.
To those who have followed Jackson’s long march through the corridors of American power, the news lands with a weight born of memory. Jackson, now 84, has been a steadfast figure from the Southern freedom trenches to the highest levels of national politics.
A protégé of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he rose from the ranks of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and helped establish its presence in Chicago before founding Operation PUSH in 1971, an organization that fought poverty, job discrimination, and corporate neglect in Black communities.
“Jesse Jackson was to Martin Luther King Jr. what Paul the Apostle was to Jesus,” social media user Reina Keeks wrote on X, after news of his hospitalization. “That’s the best way I can describe it.”
Progressive supranuclear palsy, which affects balance, movement, and eye control, was confirmed as Jackson’s diagnosis in April after years of treatment for Parkinson’s disease. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke characterizes PSP as a rare disorder that often leads to severe disability within a few years, a reality that underscores the challenges he has fought with both courage and clarity.
Jackson’s health struggles have followed years of relentless public service. He faced COVID-19 in 2021 and endured a serious fall later that year during a visit to Howard University. Yet even as his body weakened, the mission did not. Jackson stepped down as president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in 2023 after more than five decades of leadership, making space for a new generation but never abandoning the cause.
For all his global reach, Jackson never drifted from the Black community, including the Black Press of America. For years, he wrote a regular column for the more than 200 African American-owned newspapers that remain the trusted voice of the nation’s Black communities. His columns were not ceremonial. They were dispatches from a man who had seen the inside of American democracy and refused to let its promises fade. Jackson wrote about civil rights and human rights, about federal protections under threat, about the fate of Black and marginalized people navigating a nation that often wanted their labor but not their liberation.
Over the decades, Jackson expanded the country’s sense of political possibility. His campaigns for president in 1984 and 1988 forced America to confront the breadth of its electorate and the depth of its inequities. In 1988, he finished second in the Democratic primaries, reshaping party rules on delegate allocation and opening doors that would later make space for Barack Obama’s ascent.
His leadership was equally global.
Jackson negotiated for the release of Navy Lt. Robert Goodman after the pilot was shot down over Lebanon. He pressed for economic justice, voter protection, and an end to apartheid. He registered voters by the thousands and helped elect Harold Washington as Chicago’s first Black mayor. He built coalitions that stretched across class, region, gender and race.
Now, as he rests under hospital care, the civil rights community waits. They pray. They remember. And they reflect on how much of the American story Jackson has shaped.
“The family appreciates all prayers at this time,” Rainbow PUSH officials stated.
Stacy M Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
