Jesse Jackson: The fallen hero who stood for Africans
Reverend Jesse Jackson facilitated peace talks to end armed conflicts in Sudan, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo and campaigned for Africa’s economic development.
One of the most influential people who stood for Africans and the Black race, Reverend Jesse Jackson, is no more.
The veteran US civil rights activist passed away at his home in Chicago on Tuesday, 17 February, at age 84, according to his family.
Although most of his campaign was in the US, Reverend Jackson was instrumental in Africa, becoming one of the loudest voices against White-minority apartheid rule in South Africa.
He lobbied US Congress for sanctions against the apartheid regime and led delegations to South Africa multiple times, including in 1984, defying the regime's ban.
Met Mandela
And in 1985, he met with Nelson Mandela in prison and helped secure his release in 1990. Mandela later became South Africa’s first Black president in 1994, when the apartheid rule was abolished.
As Presidential Special Envoy for Africa during the US administration of Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001, Reverend Jackson facilitated peace talks to end armed conflicts in Sudan, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo and campaigned for Africa’s economic development.
In the US, Reverend Jesse Jackson was a rare gem, working closely with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He championed the use of the term "African American" to reclaim cultural identity and to replace the outdated term "coloured people".
Though used by some scholars long before, it was not in day-to-day usage until Jackson and his peers intensified the campaign in the 1980s.
He said: "To be called African Americans has cultural integrity — it puts us in our proper historical context."
Presidential bid
Jackson's impact extended to politics, where he made history as the most prominent Black candidate to run for the US presidency, participating in the Democratic Party primaries in the 1980s, before Barack Obama took the office in 2009.
To highlight his struggles, he once said: "I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had a shovel programmed for my hands."
Jackson was born Jesse Louis Burns on 8 October 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, to a teen mother and a former professional boxer. Although diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2017, his family did not disclose the cause of his death.