Rev. Jesse Jackson, a civil rights veteran and former presidential candidate who has been in declining health, will retire as president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, his son announced Friday.
Jackson will make his decision official at the organization’s national convention in Chicago on Sunday, U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson (R-IL) said.
Vice President Kamala Harris will be the keynote speaker for the event, where Jackson’s successor will be named.
“He’s had physical challenges, but he never stopped fighting. He’s been fighting for Civil Rights since 1961,” Politico quoted Jonathan Jackson as saying.
The 81-year-old Jesse Jackson was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017.
“He didn’t give up when there were forces against the Voting Rights Act, or forces against the Equal Rights Amendment or addressing priorities at home or peace abroad,” the congressman said.
The protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King ran for president as a Democrat, losing the party’s nomination to Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988. Jackson founded Operation PUSH in 1996.
Jackson will be honored for his presidential campaigns at the convention, Tavis Grant, acting national executive director of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition told the Chicago Crusader.
“Delegates from around the country are coming, and we’re excited,” Grant told the newspaper. “There will be a reunion of campaign workers, people who through sweat, energy and commitment believed in the campaign of Rev. Jackson and the Jackson doctrine.”
Jackson’s campaigns arose as a response to conservative Republican President Ronald Reagan, who served two terms after winning in 1980 against Democrat Jimmy Carter and in 1984 over Mondale.
The Nation, a political magazine, editorialized at the time that the Jackson campaign “offers hope against cynicism, power against prejudice, and solidarity against division. It is the specific antitheses to Reaganism and reaction which, with the shameful acquiescence of the Democratic center, have held America in their thrall for most of this decade.”
Jackson received 6.9 million in 1988 and won seven primaries (Alabama, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Puerto Rico, and Virginia) and four caucuses (Delaware, Michigan, South Carolina, and Vermont).
