Written By JR Robinson

I write this as JR Robinson, CEO of JustMy, not just as a publisher, but as a son of a movement Rev. Jesse Jackson helped make possible. His passing at 84, surrounded by family, closes a chapter in history that stretched from Jim Crow to the first Black president, but his impact will keep echoing in every march, every vote, and every voice that refuses to be silent.

The why behind a life of struggle and hope

Jesse Louis Jackson was born in 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, into a nation that had already decided what his life was supposed to look like — limited, segregated, and silent. He refused that script. As a young man, he joined the civil rights movement while still in college, marching in Selma alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., drawn by a simple conviction: faith without works is dead, and injustice without resistance is destiny.

He didn’t chase the spotlight; he chased the opportunity to make life more just for people who were told they were powerless. Chosen by Dr. King to lead the Chicago chapter of Operation Breadbasket, Jackson pushed for economic justice — demanding jobs, contracts, and opportunity for Black communities locked out of the mainstream economy. When King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, Jackson stood at the edge of a movement that could have splintered and faded. Instead, he shouldered part of that burden and vowed to keep hope alive, not as a slogan, but as a mission.

The “why” of his life was never complicated. He believed that the measure of a nation is not its rhetoric, but how it treats the poor, the excluded, and the voiceless. He believed that democracy dies when we stop organizing. He believed that God’s call was not to comfort the comfortable, but to confront systems that made oppression seem normal.

From King’s protégé to global conscience

After leaving the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Jackson founded Operation PUSH — People United to Save Humanity — in 1971, creating a base in Chicago to push for Black self‑help, economic empowerment, and political participation. He would later build the National Rainbow Coalition, intentionally reaching beyond race to bring together poor and working‑class people, women, LGBTQ communities, and others into what he called a “rainbow” of shared struggle.

He understood something profound: power does not concede to individual eloquence; it responds to organized coalitions. His “Rainbow Coalition” wasn’t just a phrase — it was a blueprint for how the marginalized could become a majority voice. Twice, in 1984 and 1988, he ran for president of the United States, and although he did not win the nomination, his campaigns broke ground for every Black candidate who came after him. His presidential bids were, at the time, the most successful attempts by an African American candidate, expanding the Democratic Party’s vision and coalition long before Barack Obama’s rise.

But Jackson’s reach did not stop at U.S. borders. He negotiated the release of hostages and prisoners abroad, including detainees in Cuba and a captured American pilot in Syria, using moral authority, faith, and diplomatic persistence to move hardened leaders to mercy. Later, he served as a special envoy to Africa and used that platform to push for democracy and human rights, proving that a preacher from the segregated South could grow into a global conscience.

At home, he carried his fight to Wall Street, founding the Wall Street Project to press corporate America to open its boardrooms, contracts, and hiring to people who had been locked out for generations. Everywhere he went, the message was the same: justice is not charity, inclusion is not optional, and hope is not naïve — it is strategy.

Lessons from a life that would not give up

Rev. Jesse Jackson’s life gives us more than memories; it gives us marching orders. There are lessons etched into his journey that we cannot afford to ignore.

First, he taught us that hope is a discipline, not an emotion. Hope is what you do at the negotiation table when the room is full of people who benefit from the status quo. Hope is the choice to organize one more meeting, knock on one more door, register one more voter, even when the numbers look impossible.

Second, he showed that faith must have feet. Jackson’s faith did not live behind a pulpit; it lived in picket lines, in boycotts, in coalition meetings that stretched into the night. He lived out the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” by confronting systems that were built to crush those neighbors. He prayed, but he also planned. He preached, but he also negotiated. He believed God cared about both the soul and the social order.

Third, he modeled courage in the face of imperfection — his own and this country’s. Jackson was not a flawless man; no great leader is. He was criticized, second‑guessed, and sometimes misunderstood, yet he kept showing up. He stayed in the fight through victories and setbacks, through applause and accusations. The lesson is not that heroes are perfect; it is that they refuse to abandon their post when history turns against them.

Finally, he taught us that the future belongs to coalitions. He understood that no single community can fix what is broken alone. The problems are too big, the systems too entrenched. His Rainbow Coalition vision remains a roadmap for our fractured times: bring together people who don’t look alike but hurt alike — people who share the same anxieties about wages, housing, schools, safety, and dignity — and help them see each other as allies instead of competitors.

A body that faded, a voice that never did

In his later years, Rev. Jackson faced a cruel and quiet battle. After publicly announcing a Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2017, he was later found to have progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological disorder that slowly attacks movement, balance, and speech. He endured hospital stays, falls, and the physical unravelling of a body that had once marched, preached, and traveled across the globe.

But here is what moves me deeply: even as his body failed him, his life’s message did not. Even as disease tried to silence his voice, the words he had already spoken kept marching on without him. Tributes pouring in today speak of a man whose “steadfast dedication to justice, equality, and human rights was instrumental in fostering a worldwide movement for freedom and dignity.” He left us with a library of lived sermons — some from pulpits, many from picket lines and negotiating rooms.

There is something heartbreaking and holy about a prophet whose physical strength declines while the world finally begins to speak the language he has been teaching all along. The man who once thundered “Keep hope alive” lived long enough to see new generations pick up that chant and carry it forward.

My salute to a life lived well

As JR Robinson of JustMy, I owe Rev. Jesse Jackson more than I can ever repay. My ability to write this tribute, to run a media company, to live in a world where Black voices are not just surviving but leading — all of that sits on the shoulders of people like him.

I imagine him now, not as the public figure on a stage, but as a tired elder in his final days, surrounded by family, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition at his back, his body worn down by a decade‑long neurological fight. And yet, even in that scene, I can almost hear him whisper the same words he gave a generation: don’t you quit. Don’t you give in to despair. Don’t you let cynicism have the last word. Keep hope alive.

So this is my salute:

To the young man who left the safety of the sidelines to march in Selma.
To the organizer who turned hunger and unemployment into a call for economic justice.
To the candidate who dared to ask America to see a Black man as its president before the country was ready.
To the envoy who walked into rooms with dictators and dignitaries and asked them to choose mercy.
To the preacher who believed that the gospel must touch policy, paychecks, and prison bars.

Rev. Jesse Jackson did not just live a long life; he lived a life that stretched the moral imagination of a nation. He leaves behind no empty seat — only a chair that now belongs to all of us. The question is not whether there will be another Jesse Jackson. There will not. The question is whether we will honor him by becoming the kind of people his life prepared us to be.

If you ever felt unseen, unheard, or unwanted in your own country, his life is a love letter to you. If you ever doubted that faith could change policy or that hope could be a strategy, his story is your evidence. If you ever wondered whether one voice can still matter in an age of noise, his journey is your answer.

Rest well, Reverend. Your race is run. Your work is sown in the hearts of those you lifted. We will cry, we will remember, and then — for you, for ourselves, for the children coming behind us — we will do the one thing you asked of us over and over again:

We will keep hope alive.