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Jesse Jackson, who passed away on Tuesday (February 17) at the age of 84,  was one of the most courageous and prophetic figures in late 20th-century American politics. Born Jesse Louis Burns on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, during the height of the Jim Crow era and raised initially by his grandmother until age 13, when his stepfather Charles Jackson adopted him and gave him his surname, Jackson grew up amid the humiliations and deprivations of segregated Southern life – walking miles past white schools to attend underfunded Black ones, facing daily racism, and internalising the sting of being teased as a child for his illegitimacy and absent biological father.

Yet these early hardships forged resilience: at racially segregated Sterling High School, he excelled as an honour student, class president, and star athlete in football, basketball, and baseball, earning scholarships that took him first to the University of Illinois and then to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he immersed himself in student activism, including sit-ins and the local Congress of Racial Equality chapter.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

His activism deepened in the 1960s when, as a young college student, he marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in the historic Selma to Montgomery voting rights campaign of 1965, answering King’s call and joining the throngs that confronted state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This direct participation in mass nonviolent protest placed Jackson within King’s inner circle; by 1966, King appointed him to lead Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, an economic justice initiative pressuring businesses to hire and promote Black workers.

Jackson was present at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 3, 1968, when King delivered his final “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, and he stood on the balcony the next day when the assassin’s bullet struck. These experiences cemented Jackson’s role as a protégé and inheritor of King’s mantle, even as he navigated controversies in the aftermath.

Rainbow coalition, a bold challenge to the status quo

His daring presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, built around the vision of a Rainbow Coalition, embodied a bold challenge to the entrenched structures of racial and economic inequality. Drawing on the legacy of the civil rights movement, Jackson mobilised a multiracial alliance of the marginalised – African Americans, Latinos, working-class whites, women, LGBTQ communities, Arab Americans, and others – against the neoliberal drift of both major parties. In a Gramscian sense, Jackson sought to construct a counter-hegemonic bloc, contesting the consensual domination of corporate elites and their ideological grip on American “common sense.”

His rhetoric and organising disrupted the narrow parameters of acceptable political discourse, forcing the Democratic Party to confront its own exclusions and hypocrisies. For this audacity alone –........

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