Jesse Jackson – a Servant Leader, dies

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Baptist minister and two-time presidential candidate whose booming oratory and populist message propelled the Civil Rights Movement in the decades after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., died on Tuesday, February 17, 2026, his family said.

He was 84.

“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 said in a statement.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader, said in a statement that “our nation lost one of its greatest moral voices” and paid tribute to a man who “carried history in his footsteps and hope in his voice”.

“Reverend Jackson stood wherever dignity was under attack, from apartheid abroad to injustice at home. His voice echoed in boardrooms and in jail cells,” Sharpton said.

A cause of death was not immediately given. Jackson’s family said he died peacefully surrounded by his loved ones.

He was admitted to a hospital in November and had been living for more than a decade with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), according to his Rainbow PUSH Coalition. PSP affects patients’ ability to walk and swallow and can lead to dangerous complications.

Jackson revealed that he had Parkinson’s in 2017. He was treated as an outpatient at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago for at least two years before he shared his diagnosis with the public.

Public observances will be held in Chicago and future plans for celebration of life events will be announced by the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Jackson family said in its statement Tuesday.Jackson was born in Greenville, South Carolina, and rose to prominence in the Civil Rights era, participating in demonstrations alongside King. His activism spanned decades, including two runs for the Democratic presidential nomination, in 1984 and 1988.

In the first race, he won more than 18% of the primary vote and a handful of primaries and caucuses.

“Merely by being black and forcing other candidates to consider his very real potential to garner black votes, which they need, Jackson has had an impact,” read a 1984 New York Times profile.

Four years later, he built on that success by winning 11 primaries and caucuses.

Jackson began his work as an organizer with the Congress of Racial Equality, participating in marches and sit-ins. He attended North Carolina A&T State University and graduated with a degree in sociology. He began rallying student support for King during his divinity studies at Chicago Theological Seminary and participated in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march in Alabama.

In 1962, Jackson married Jacqueline Brown, who survives him. They have five children, including former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill. (Source: NBC NEWS)