I last connected with Jesse Jackson at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where former Vice President Kamala Harris accepted her party’s nomination. By then, Jackson, who died Tuesday at 84, was wheelchair-bound, slowed by Parkinson’s disease. He had also lost much of his ability to communicate, his singular political gift borne out of struggle and Black religious culture. But Jesse, which is what people called him, was still a force, embodying the story of a nation and a party he helped to transform through sheer force of will.

Tim Cook Seems Determined to Keep Bruising Apple

One Year of RFK Jr. Has Left Public Health Devastated

All These New Independents Are Making Politics More Partisan

Californians Deserve Better Than Economic Fairy Tales

That fire — a contagious passion and electricity — powered his runs for the White House in 1984 and 1988, drawing a patchwork of Americans to see and feel politics in a different way. Forty years after that first run, he was feted in 2024 by the party he remade, in the town he helped shape, by people he empowered to lead.

An acolyte of Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackson was ever the outsider, prevailing on elites from every sector of American life to open up the closed gates that had shut people like him out. He abhorred bland and cautious centrism and urged his party, now locked in a similar struggle over its identity, to embrace a racially inclusive economic populism.

With his 7 million votes and second-place finish in 1988, he pushed the Democratic Party to a more representative nominating process. Every nominee that succeeded his run had to assemble the rainbow coalition of voters that he envisioned.

“America is not like a blanket — one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt — many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread,” he said in his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1984. “The White, the Hispanic, the Black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt. Even in our fractured state, all of us count and fit somewhere.”

Born poor to a teenage mother in segregated South Carolina, Jackson seemed always to be speaking for and to the left-behind, urging America toward a fair, more representative union. He was an inspiration to young activists, including my father, who himself had marched alongside King and later Jackson. In 1983, when Jackson helped negotiate the release of captured US Navy Lieutenant Robert O. Goodman, Jr., my father beamed with pride: “Jesse got him out!”

Jackson’s run for the White House in 1984 seems inevitable now, but it was a radical gesture, upending the way average Americans thought about power. He was a way in.

Bloomberg may send me offers and promotions.

By submitting my information, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

“For more than 60 years, Reverend Jackson helped lead some of the most significant movements for change in human history,” said former President Barack Obama, whose wife, Michelle, grew up close to the Jackson family, in a statement. “From organizing boycotts and sit-ins, to registering millions of voters, to advocating for freedom and democracy around the world, he was relentless in his belief that we are all children of God, deserving of dignity and respect.”

Critics, particularly in the media, often derided Jackson privately as a relentless self-promoter, a complicated figure with a messy personal life. But even as he might have been a tireless promoter of himself, it was always clear that he also wanted to uplift others. His political calculus wasn’t informed by pollsters and focus groups. It simply included everyone.

“Our father was a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in a statement. “We ask you to honor his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by.”

Jackson had a clear vision for the kind of America he wanted to see. He was a hopeful warrior, an American patriot and an American original. As the nation and the party he transformed turns to writing future chapters, his story of hope and endurance is worth remembering.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

Trump’s Racist Post Was Harmful. His Policies Are, Too: Ronald Brownstein

A Judge Accused Noem of Racism. It’s Hard to Defend Her: Stephen L. Carter

4 Place Where Democrats’ Identity Crisis Will Play Out: Nia-Malika Henderson

Want more Bloomberg Opinion? OPIN . Or subscribe to our daily newsletter.

© Bloomberg