By the Sun-Reporter Staff

Jesse Jackson was born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1941. Segregated buses. Separate water fountains. A library he wasn’t allowed to use for a school project. He was seventeen years old. He got seven friends together and staged a sit-in until they let him in.

That was the whole blueprint right there. Find the closed door. Walk through it anyway.

He died February 17, 2026. He was 84. His family said he went peacefully, surrounded by the people he loved. He had been fighting progressive supranuclear palsy for years — a neurological disorder that took his movement and his voice, two things he had used better than almost anyone alive.

He leaves behind a country that is better than it would have been without him. Not as good as it should be. But better.

Here’s what people forget. Jackson was in the photographs taken at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968 — the ones snapped in the seconds before Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. He was standing right there. He was 26 years old. His mentor was assassinated in front of him and he kept moving.

Forty years. That’s how long he kept moving after that.

He built Operation PUSH and then the Rainbow Coalition. He ran for president in 1984 and won three million votes. He ran again in 1988 and won seven million. No Black candidate had ever gotten that far. Barack Obama was watching. Obama said so himself — Michelle got her first look at political organizing at the Jacksons’ kitchen table when she was a teenager.

The line that said everything about him: I was born in a slum, but the slum was not born in me.

He said that and meant it and proved it every day for eight decades.

The tributes came from everywhere. Obama called him a giant. Kamala Harris said he let people know their voices mattered. Bernice King — Martin Luther King’s daughter — posted a photo of her father standing beside Jackson and wrote two words: both now ancestors.

Even Donald Trump called him a force of nature. Said it was always his pleasure to help Jesse along the way. Make of that what you will.

He will lie in state this Thursday and Friday at Rainbow PUSH headquarters in Chicago, the city he made his own. Services will follow in Washington D.C. and South Carolina, where it started. The People’s Celebration is March 6 at House of Hope on 114th Street. Everyone is welcome.

He will be buried at Oak Woods Cemetery on Chicago’s South Side. Harold Washington is there. Ida B. Wells is there. Jesse Owens is there.

Good company.

He kept hope alive for sixty years. Now it’s our turn.

The Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr., 1941–2026. Founder, Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Presidential candidate 1984 and 1988. Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2000.