Jesse Jackson

Jesse Louis Jackson (né Burns; born October 8, 1941) is an American civil rights activist, politician, and ordained Baptist minister. Beginning as a young protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, Jackson has maintained his status as a prominent civil rights leader throughout his political and theological career for over seven decades. He served from 1991 to 1997 as a shadow delegate and senator for the District of Columbia. Jackson is the father of former U.S. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. and incumbent U.S. Representative Jonathan Jackson.

Jackson began his activism in the 1960s and founded the organizations that merged to form the Rainbow/PUSH organization. Extending his activism into international matters beginning in the 1980s, he became a critic of the Reagan administration and launched a presidential campaign in 1984. Initially seen as a fringe candidate, Jackson finished in third place for the Democratic nomination, behind former Vice President Walter Mondale and Senator Gary Hart. He continued his activism for the next three years, and mounted a second bid for president in 1988. Exceeding expectations once again, Jackson finished as the runner-up to Governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis.

Jackson never sought the presidency again, but was elected to the United States Senate in 1990 for the District of Columbia, for which he would serve one term as a shadow delegate during the Bush and Clinton administrations. Initially a critic of President Bill Clinton, he became a supporter. Jackson hosted Both Sides with Jesse Jackson on CNN from 1992 to 2000. He has been a critic of police brutality, the Republican Party, and conservative policies, and is regarded as one of the most influential African-American activists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Jackson was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on October 8, 1941, to Helen Burns (1924–2015), a 16-year-old high school student, and her 33-year-old married neighbor, Noah Louis Robinson (1908–1997). His ancestry includes Cherokee, enslaved African-Americans, Irish plantation owners, and a Confederate sheriff. Robinson was a former professional boxer who was an employee of a textile brokerage and a well-known figure in the black community. One year after Jesse's birth, his mother married Charles Henry Jackson, a post office maintenance worker who later adopted the boy. Jesse was given his stepfather's name in the adoption, but as he grew up he also maintained a close relationship with Robinson. He considers both men to be his fathers.

As a child, Jackson was taunted by other children about his out-of-wedlock birth and has said these experiences helped motivate him to succeed. Living under Jim Crow segregation laws, Jackson was taught to go to the back of the bus and use separate water fountains—practices he accepted until the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. He attended the racially segregated Sterling High School in Greenville, where he was elected student class president, finished tenth in his class, and earned letters in baseball, football, and basketball.

Upon graduating from high school in 1959, he rejected a contract from a minor league professional baseball team so that he could attend the University of Illinois on a football scholarship. After his second semester at the predominantly white college, Jackson transferred to North Carolina A&T, a historically black university in Greensboro, North Carolina. Accounts of the reasons for the transfer differ, though Jackson has said that he changed schools because racial prejudice prevented him from playing quarterback and limited his participation on a competitive public-speaking team.

Writing an article on ESPN.com in 2002, sociologist Harry Edwards noted that the University of Illinois had previously had a black quarterback, but also noted that black athletes attending traditionally white colleges during the 1950s and 1960s encountered a "combination of culture shock and discrimination". Edwards also suggested that Jackson had left the University of Illinois in 1960 because he had been placed on academic probation, but the school's president reported in 1987 that Jackson's 1960 freshman year transcript was clean and said he would have been eligible to re-enroll at any time.

At A&T, Jackson played quarterback and was elected student body president. He became active in local civil rights protests against segregated libraries, theaters, and restaurants. He graduated with a B.S. in sociology in 1964, then attended the Chicago Theological Seminary on a scholarship. He dropped out in 1966, three classes short of earning his master's degree, to focus full-time on the civil rights movement. He was ordained a minister in 1968 and was awarded a Master of Divinity degree by Chicago Theological Seminary in 2000 based on his previous credits earned plus his life experience and subsequent work.