Jesse Jackson’s legacy: The global moral authority who refused to stay in his lane
The Jesse Jackson legacy spans civil rights, anti-apartheid activism, LGBTQ advocacy, and global moral leadership.
On a warm Chicago evening in September 2017, Aretha Franklin interrupted her own Ravinia Festival concert, a moment that captures the Jesse Jackson legacy more clearly than any obituary headline,
What followed was not polite applause. It was warmth. An audience-wide outpouring of gratitude to a man who’d spent his life in service. Only the most hard-hearted could remain unmoved.
Jackson, a protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King died on 17 February 2026 at the age of 84. Responses to his death quickly showed a pattern. Dignitaries, ordinary folk, some too young to fully appreciate what he represented, all responding to him as the man who showed up.
And show up he did. Soweto, 1979. 1984’s Democratic National Convention. Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990. Jackson was a man we could count on. Believe in. That’s rarer than it sounds.
Jesse Jackson’s legacy in South Africa: showing up early and staying late
Jackson first arrived in South Africa in 1979, two years after Steve Biko died in police custody. The Reagan administration was still promoting “constructive engagement”, diplomatic doublespeak for inaction. Most American politicians refrained from engagement.
Jackson did not. He went straight to Soweto and told gathered crowds, hungry for change, that the land will change hands. “Apartheid is violence by definition…. Ultimately in its arrogance it challenges God’s right to make a black person,” he said.
Returning to the United States he started lobbying relentlessly against apartheid. The Vatican. Moscow. London. He even pressed Margaret Thatcher, who refused to budge. Jackson pushed universities, including Harvard, to divest from South Africa.
“The idea of Harvard and South Africa in economic alliance is despicable and distasteful,” Jackson said. “Would Harvard students tolerate investments in the Third Reich?”
In 1985, he marched in Trafalgar Square alongside Oliver Tambo and Father Trevor Huddleston, as more than 100,000 people demanded Nelson Mandela’s release.
And, when Mandela walked out of the Victor Verster Prison in 1990, Jackson was there.
In 1994, he was part of the US delegation at South Africa’s first democratic inauguration. Jackson kept returning after 1994, when many of his contemporaries moved on.
“Africans are free but not equal, Americans are free but not equal. Ending apartheid and ending slavery was a big deal, Mandela becoming president of South Africa, [Barack] Obama becoming the first African American president was a big deal, but we have to go deeper,” he wrote in a 2013 opinion piece for The Guardian.
South Africa awarded Jackson the Order of the Companions of OR Tambo in 2013 for his role in the anti-apartheid struggle. During the award visit, he warned that Black South Africans were politically free while white South Africans remained economically dominant. Freedom without economic justice, he said, was a holding pattern.
When President Cyril Ramaphosa described Jackson this week as a “global moral authority”, it stood out. South Africa rarely uses that kind of language for American politicians these days. It reserves it for people who did something.
Palestine, principle, and the positions that cost him
In 1979, the Carter administration forced UN ambassador Andrew Young to resign for meeting with a representative of the PLO. Jackson was incensed. He had spent years watching the US condemn South Africa for refusing to negotiate with Black leaders. That principle vanished, he argued, when the stateless people were Palestinian.
Jackson travelled to Lebanon and met Yasser Arafat himself. He endorsed a two-state solution long before it was acceptable in mainstream US politics. During his 1984 presidential campaign, that position functioned as political self-sabotage. He did not retreat.
At the 1984 Democratic National Convention, he explicitly linked Palestine to South Africa, noting Israeli arms sales to apartheid Pretoria. In an interview with the Institute for Palestine Studies, he said American leaders who condemned occupation everywhere except the West Bank forfeited credibility.
His 1984 and 1988 presidential runs didn’t put Jackson in the White House. They did something more durable, however. Jackson is credited with urging the Democratic Party to embrace diversity as a core strength rather than a political liability. That a “big-tent” coalition, which actually looks like America, might actually win.
Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign didn’t appear from nowhere. It stood on scaffolding Jackson had built. Beyond elections, Jackson operated in a diplomatic category without official name. He traveled the world as negotiator and statesman without a government mandate, visiting African countries, meeting heads of state, securing the release of hostages and prisoners through personal persuasion.
As recently as 2024, battling progressive supranuclear palsy and largely unable to speak, Jackson convened an emergency summit through the Rainbow PUSH Coalition calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. He sat in the front row. Listened closely. Still there.
1984, LGBTQ+ rights, and a Baptist minister ahead of his time
Twenty years before same sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts, Jesse Jackson made LGBTQ+ rights a central part of his presidential campaign. He did so in 1984, at the height of the AIDS crisis, while Ronald Reagan had yet to publicly acknowledge the epidemic.
Jackson became the first speaker at the 1984 Democratic National Convention to address gay and lesbian Americans directly. He grounded his argument in scripture. The Gospels, he said, did not allow selective dignity.
Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition was intentionally and unapologetically intersectional. Black Americans. Labour unions. Faith communities. LGBTQ+ Americans. Not because it was electorally efficient, but because excluding any of them felt dishonest.
This is where he most closely resembled Desmond Tutu. Both men believed exclusion imposed obligation. Tutu said he would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven and meant it. Jackson quoted the Gospel of Matthew. He meant it. Different roads. Same destination.
Jackson watched the leaders of his generation get killed. JFK. MLK. Malcolm X. Bobby Kennedy. The murders were not abstract history to Jackson; they were colleagues, mentors, people he had marched beside and learned from. He stepped into that void anyway.
What Dr. King did to America’s constitution, Jackson did to its caste system. Different targets, same method: show up, refuse comfort, keep pushing. The word rebel is overused. In Jackson’s case it’s accurate.
The current vacancy
France awarded Jackson the Légion d’Honneur. President Emmanuel Macron said the award recognised “a long walk towards emancipation and justice.” Not bad for a country preacher from South Carolina. And that is what Jackson called himself. The country preacher.
The description was accurate and also deeply misleading, because his congregation was enormous. He spoke in Black pulpits across America, organised the Black Expo and the Wall Street Project, ran the annual PUSH Convention, built PUSH Excel, and anchored the annual tribute to Martin Luther King.
“Leadership grounded in shared humanity transcends boundaries,” says Hanlie van Wyk, founder of Chicago-based Leading Across Cultures. “Rev. Jackson embodied that. He didn’t just speak for justice; he built bridges across difference. Desmond Tutu reminded us, “we belong to one another,” and Jackson lived that truth through connection, compassion, and courage. His legacy challenges every global leader to use influence to unite, not divide.”
The loss of Jackson highlights a profound vacancy. Who will speak with equal moral clarity for the poor in Chicago? For those under occupation in Gaza? For LGBTQ Americans facing fresh political hostility, without treating any of those constituencies as a liability to be managed?
Jackson’s family described him this week as “our father was a servant leader not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world”.
Right now, the Jesse Jackson legacy leaves a vacancy no one else has stepped forward to fill. We’ve lost a great man. An ally. Right now, the role of moral rudder is vacant.