Jesse Jackson, one of North Carolina A&T’s most famous alumni, who bravely took up the civil rights mantle after the tragic death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., passed on Tuesday at his home in Chicago. He was 84.
Jackson, a Greenville, South Carolina native, attended A&T in the early 1960s where he became a student leader, president of the student body and a quarterback on the 1964 CIAA championship football team.
He went on to study theology at Chicago Theological Seminary and later joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under Dr. King. He became a close aide to King and was present in Memphis in 1968 on the night of King’s assassination — a moment that would shape Jackson’s mission for the rest of his life.
In the decades that followed, Jackson founded Operation PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition, organizations dedicated to empowering black communities politically and economically and lent his services for diplomatic and humanitarian missions and issues around the world. His presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 broke barriers for African Americans in national politics, winning millions of votes and inspiring a new generation of leaders.