A political giant and cultural icon has passed away.
February 17. 2026
Although I am a conservative Republican, I always had a grudging admiration for Jesse Jackson. And not because he was a civil rights advocate. Civil rights advocates are a dime a dozen.
But Rev. Jackson was basically a street fighter who fought the system, especially the compliant Black civil rights establishment and the Democrat Party insiders who rigged their Convention rules to deny him the voice he deserved during his highly successful runs for President.
Jackson was born in the Jim Crow South in 1941, to an 18-year-old high school student who was impregnated by her 33-year-old married neighbor. Perhaps that was why he was strongly pro-life until his Presidential ambitions forced him to flip-flop. He excelled academically but many do not realize he was also an accomplished athlete, lettering in baseball, basketball and football in high school and playing quarterback for North Carolina A&T. A natural leader, he was also a high school and college class president.
He became a Baptist Minister and an acolyte of the rising civil rights leader, Martin Luther King. With Reverend King’s assassination, Jackson and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy had a brutal political fight over several years as to who would continue King’s legacy. But Jackson’s charisma and superior organizational ability prevailed and by the late 1970s, Jackson was seen by the media and general population as the spokesman for Blacks.
He parlayed this visibility into a run for President in 1984. He set fire to his potential campaign by becoming the first Black to address the Alabama legislature and stated: “It is about time we forgot about black and white and started talking about employed and unemployed”.
His populist message resonated, and he won the early primaries of New Hampshire and South Carolina. But Democratic party insiders, believing he was unelectable, manipulated the delegate rules so that Jackson soon fell too far behind in the delegate count destroying his momentum. This enabled Walter Mondale to win later primaries, gather the most votes and become the nominee. Mondale went on to lose 49 of the 50 states. No one knows if Jackson would have done better, but it is unlikely he could have done worse.
Jackson again sought the Democratic nomination in 1988, with similar results.
Jackson was not without his faults. He once referred to New York City as “Hymietown” although he later apologized for such blatant antisemitism. He delivered a commencement address at Medgar Evers College in which he stated that young people were “experiencing an ethical collapse, a spiritual withdrawal, and escaping this reality through drugs, alcohol, sex without love, making unwanted babies and turning on each other with violence.” Yet he cheated on his wife, fathering a child out of wedlock. And he defended the huckster Jessie Smollett, even after it was obvious that Smollett staged the attack against him by supposed Trump supporters.
Jackson had the ability to build bridges with those on the opposite side of the fence. He met with segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace and stated afterwards “[Wallace is] one of the most forward of any governor across the South in terms of the sharing of appointments with blacks and whites and women, and the tone of the administration had changed”.
He was an occasional guest on conservative icon William Buckley’s Firing Line and could hold his own to Buckley’s incisive questions. The two men became such friends that when Buckley was hospitalized, Jackson came to visit and the two men prayed together.
When fighter pilot Lt Robert O. Goodman was shot down over Lebanon in 1984, Jackson irritated the diplomatic establishment and led a delegation that negotiated his release. Upon returning to the United States, President Reagan had the two men come to the White House and commented on Jackson’s diplomacy with the statement: “You can’t argue with success.”
According to published reports, Rev. Jackson died of PSP or Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. But none of these articles mentioned what a hideous disease this is. PSP is a neurological disease similar to Parkinson’s that results in balance loss, poor eye movement and behavioral changes. But its most devastating symptom is inability to swallow, resulting in episodes of choking and aspiration pneumonia. It is possible that Rev. Jackson’s last months were extremely unpleasant, to put in mildly.
But Jackson will be remembered as a true American who successfully went to bat for those he believed were oppressed. And he lifted the lives of many. As President Reagan said, “You can’t argue with success.”
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