'One of America's greatest patriots' | Tributes pour in for Jesse Jackson

Veteran political activist Reverend Jesse Jackson, one of America's most influential Black voices, was hailed Tuesday as a pillar of the struggle for civil rights after his death at age 84.

Barack Obama led the tributes offered up to Jackson, who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s and twice sought the Democratic nomination for the presidency in the 1980s.

"We stood on his shoulders," Obama wrote on X, saying Jackson laid the foundation for his own historic victory decades later in becoming the first Black US president. He praised Jackson as "a true giant."

Jackson's family said he died peacefully Tuesday morning. They did not release a cause of death, but Jackson revealed in 2017 that he had the degenerative neurological disease Parkinson's. He was hospitalized in November in connection to another neurodegenerative condition, according to media reports.

Jackson was a dynamic orator and a successful mediator in international disputes. The longtime Baptist minister expanded the space for African Americans on the national stage for more than six decades.

He was present for many consequential moments in the long battle for racial justice in the United States, including with King in Memphis in 1968 when the civil rights leader was slain.

He openly wept in the crowd as Obama celebrated his 2008 presidential election, and he stood with George Floyd's family in 2021 after a court convicted a police officer of the unarmed Black man's murder during an arrest.

Republican President Donald Trump, who has a checkered record on race relations and has been critical of the civil rights movement, praised Jackson as an engaging, gregarious and street-smart man -- and claimed credit for helping him both before and after becoming president as Jackson fought to empower Black Americans.

"Jesse was a force of nature like few others before him," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Kamala Harris, the first Black vice president, who went on to lose the 2024 election to Trump, hailed Jackson as "one of America's greatest patriots."

Harris' former boss, ex-president Joe Biden, said in a statement that Jackson "believed in his bones" in the idea that all people are created equal and deserve to be treated as such.

Biden remembered Jackson as "determined and tenacious. Unafraid of the work to redeem the soul of our Nation."

Jackson's family said that he was a "servant leader" for the "oppressed, the voiceless and the overlooked around the world."

"His unwavering belief in justice, equality and love uplifted millions, and we ask you to honor his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by," the family said in a statement.

Jackson was born Jesse Louis Burns on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, to an unwed teen mother and a former professional boxer.

He later adopted the last name of his stepfather, Charles Jackson.

"I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had a shovel programmed for my hands," he once said.

He excelled in his segregated high school and earned a football scholarship to the University of Illinois, but later transferred to the predominantly Black Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, where he received a degree in sociology.

In 1960, he participated in his first sit-in, in Greenville, and then joined the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights marches in 1965, where he caught King's attention.

Jackson later emerged as a mediator and envoy on several notable international fronts.

He became a prominent advocate for ending apartheid in South Africa, and in the 1990s served as presidential special envoy for Africa for Bill Clinton.

Missions to free US prisoners took him to Syria, Iraq and Serbia.

He founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization focused on social justice and political activism, in 1996.

He is survived by his wife and six children.

AFP