RIP Fellow Chicagoan Rev. Jesse Jackson

©iStock/fumiko Inoue

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose impassioned oratory and populist vision of a “rainbow coalition” of the poor and forgotten made him 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, died on Tuesday (2/17/26) at his home in Chicago. He was 84.