Jesse Jackson Still Provides Light in These Dark Times
We would be wise to follow the path he forged.
“Jesse Jackson is one of the very most significant political leaders in this country in the last 100 years,” declared Senator Bernie Sanders, summarizing the importance of Jackson’s remarkable life and his historic 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns.
His historic journey began in the humblest of circumstances. He was born the son of a single, teenage mother in Greenville, South Carolina, deep in the Jim Crow segregated South. He rose to be in the public eye for over six decades, a globally recognized warrior for justice. He became the youngest of Dr. Martin Luther King’s SCLC leadership group, organizing Operation Breadbasket, which mobilized African Americans to apply economic pressure on corporations to open their jobs, contracts, and boards to minorities. After King’s tragic assassination, he rapidly rose to be a leading voice of the civil rights movement as the head of People United to Save Humanity (PUSH), which he founded in Chicago.