Democratic presidential primary candidate Jesse Jackson speaks at a campaign rally at a Baptist Church in Dayton, Ohio, April 14, 1984. 

The death of the Rev. Jesse Jackson at the age of 84 on Tuesday marks the end of the historical Civil Rights era. He was, as the New York Times put it, “the nation’s most influential Black figure in the years between the civil rights crusades of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the election of Barack Obama.”

I will always remember Jackson from an encounter I had with him in 1984 in Portland, Ore., during his first run for president, on the topic of whether my cartoons of him were inadvertently racist. I was 23-years-old, had just started out my career as a political cartoonist with the Oregonian newspaper and was invited to participate in his interview with the editorial board.

News: The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who led the Civil Rights Movement for decades after King, has died at 84

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Jackson emerged as a powerful force in the 1984 Democratic presidential primary. Along with former Vice President Walter Mondale and Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado, Jackson was very much at the forefront of the political conversation. As a result, he was a regular subject for me — and all the other editorial cartoonists around the country — to caricature. 

As a young white man who, having grown up in Minnesota and the Upper........

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