The Reverend Jesse Jackson died on February 17, 2026, at age 84. Tying together the past and the future, this weekend’s annual commemorative crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge will honor his legacy.
The past that his legacy will honor is rooted in March 7, 1965, when marchers set out across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, headed for the state capital at Montgomery.
The trigger for their march was the shooting death of an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmy Lee Jackson, but their journey had begun a full three years before, in 1963, when Black organizers in the Dallas County Voters League launched a drive to get Black voters in Selma registered. They had chosen Selma because while there were more Black people than white people among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, the city’s voting rolls were 99% white.
In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, but the measure did not adequately address the problem of voter suppression. In Selma a judge had stopped protests over voter registration by issuing an injunction prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.
To call attention to the crisis in her city, Amelia Boynton, a member of the Dallas County Voters League acting with a group of local activists, traveled to Birmingham to invite the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the city. King had become a household name after delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.
King and other prominent members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) arrived in January to push the voter registration drive. For seven weeks, Black residents tried to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.
Then on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.
Jackson died eight days later, on February 26.
The leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.
On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured future U.S. representative John Lewis’s skull and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
Images of “Bloody Sunday” on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray and asked faith leaders to join him.
A young seminary student from Chicago named Jesse Jackson organized a group of students to answer King’s call. Born in South Carolina in 1941, Jackson was president of his high school class and at Greensboro’s North Carolina A&T College became active in the civil rights movement. After graduating from college in 1964, Jackson began his studies at Chicago Theological Seminary.
The marchers set out again on March 9. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the people in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.
The marchers remained determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, but Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them. So President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, they had the protection of 1,900 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers, their ranks growing as they walked. When they arrived at the Alabama State Capitol on March 25, they numbered about 25,000 people.
On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”
That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.
On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”
But many of the marchers recognized that civil rights needed economic justice. Before he left Selma to go back to Chicago, Jesse Jackson asked Ralph Abernathy, a pastor and civil rights activist who was King’s closest friend and advisor, for a job with SCLC to prepare to spread the civil rights movement from the South into northern cities. King hired Jackson to lead Chicago’s Operation Breadbasket, a campaign that created economic opportunities in Black communities by boycotting businesses that would not hire Black employees. In 1967, Jackson became the national director of Operation Breadbasket.
After clashes with Abernathy, who took over SCLC after King’s assassination, in 1971 Jackson launched his own organization for economic empowerment: Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity). In 1984, Jackson left the organization to run for president. In a speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, after Republican president Ronald Reagan had turned the country sharply away from the liberal programs of the past thirty years, Jackson reminded Americans: “Our flag is red, white, and blue, but our nation is a rainbow—red, yellow, brown, black, and white—and we’re all precious in God’s sight.”
“America is not like a blanket—one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size,” he said. “America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt…. [W]e have experienced pain but progress, as we ended American apartheid laws. We got public accommodations. We secured voting rights. We obtained open housing, as young people got the right to vote.” But he noted the losses, too, including “Martin…and Viola.” Jackson pulled together a “Rainbow Coalition” to build a base of those hurt by the new direction of the country. In 1996, his organizations merged.
Jackson’s funeral services today in Chicago were packed with mourners, including former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Obama recalled how Jackson paved the way for people like him by promising everyone “that they mattered, that their voices and their votes counted. He invited them to believe. He invited us to believe in our own power to change America for the better.”
Obama continued: “He was talking about everyone who was left out, everyone who was forgotten, everyone who was unseen, everyone who was unheard. And in that sense, he was expressing the very essence of what our democracy should be, the ideals at the very heart of the American experiment, the belief that regardless of what we look like or how we worship, regardless of where our ancestors come from or how much money we got, we’re all part of the American family. We’re all endowed with the same inalienable rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We’re all obligated to answer the call and step forward and take responsibility for making wrongs right and for caring for our neighbors, and bringing the reality of America a step closer to its glorious ideals.”
“We are living in a time when it can be hard to hope,” Obama said. “Each day we wake up to some new assault on our democratic institutions, another setback to the idea of the rule of law, an offense to common decency. Every day you wake up to things you just didn’t think were possible. Each day, we’re told by those in high office to fear each other and to turn on each other, and that some Americans count more than others, and that some don’t even count at all. Everywhere we see greed and bigotry being celebrated and bullying and mockery masquerading as strength, we see science and expertise denigrated while ignorance and dishonesty and cruelty and corruption are reaping untold rewards. Every single day we see that, and it’s hard to hope in those moments. So it may be tempting to get discouraged, to give into cynicism. It may be tempting for some to compromise with power, and grab what you can, or even for good people to maybe just put your head down and wait for the storm to pass.”
But, Obama said, Jackson’s life “inspires us to take a harder path. His voice calls on each of us to be heralds of change, to be messengers of hope…. Wherever we have a chance to make an impact, whether it’s in our school or our workplaces or our neighborhoods or our cities, not for fame, not for glory, or because success is guaranteed, but because it gives our life purpose, because it aligns with what our faith tells us God demands, and because if we don’t step up, no one else will.”
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Notes:
https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/37721510v1p2.pdf
https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/august-6-1965-remarks-signing-voting-rights-act
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/selma-montgomery-march
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/jackson-jesse-louis
https://mississippi-www.brtsite.com/newsdetail/851041
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/abernathy-ralph-david
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/operation-breadbasket
https://abc7chicago.com/live-updates/when-is-reverend-jesse-jacksons-funeral-celebration-life-begins-thursday-see-schedule-arrangements-live-updates/18650377/
https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/local/alabama/2026/02/24/2026-selma-bridge-crossing-events-will-honor-jesse-jackson/88738285007/
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/barack-obama-jesse-jackson-memorial-speech-full-transcript/
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-rainbow-coalition-speech-to-the-democratic-national-convention/
