Jesse Jackson

Jesse Louis Burns was born on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina. His parents, Helen Burns, a high school student at the time of her son's birth, and Noah Robinson, a 33-year-old married man who was her neighbor, never married. A year after Jesse's birth, his mother married Charles Henry Jackson, a post office maintenance worker, who later adopted Jesse. He grew up during segregation. He and his mother had to sit in the back of the bus and his black elementary school lacked the amenities the town's white elementary school had. "There was no grass in the yard," Jackson later recalled. "I couldn't play, couldn't roll over because our school yard was full of sand. And if it rained, it turned into red dirt."

In school Jackson was a good student and an exceptional athlete. In 1959 attended the University of Illinois on a football scholarship. But Jackson spent just a year at the largely white school before transferring to the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina (now North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University) in Greensboro, where he got involved in the civil rights demonstrations in the town. It was during this time that he also met Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, whom he married in 1962.

In 1964, Jackson graduated from college with a degree in sociology. The next year he went to Selma, Alabama, to march with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., eventually becoming a worker in Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1966, he moved to Chicago, where he did graduate work at the Chicago Theological Seminary. Jackson decided to leave school in order to work for Dr. King, who appointed him director of Operation Breadbasket, the economic arm of the SCLC. But his time with the SCLC was not entirely smooth. Many felt that Jackson acted too independently. After Dr. King’s assassination, he resigned from the organization in 1971.

The same year Jackson left the SCLC, he founded Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity). Jackson created the organization, based in Chicago, in order to advocate black self-help. In 1984, he established the National Rainbow Coalition, whose mission was to establish equal rights for all minorities. He called for Arab Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, youth, disabled veterans, small farmers, African Americans, women, Jewish Americans, and homosexuals to all join together. The two organizations merged in 1996 to form the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. The merged entity advocates for minorities. Its main economic goal is to have more minorities on the payrolls, in the boardrooms, and on the supplier lists of major corporations. The industries it most aggressively pursues are the financial sector on Wall Street, the telecommunications field, and high-tech firms in Silicon Valley.

In the 1970s, Jackson began traveling around the world to mediate or spotlight problems and disputes. He visited South Africa in 1979 and spoke out against the country's apartheid policies, and later traveled to the Middle East to throw his support behind the creation of a Palestinian state. He also got behind democratic efforts in Haiti.

In 1984, Jackson became the second African American (preceded by Shirley Chisholm) to make a national run for the United States presidency. The campaign was largely successful. Jackson placed third in the Democratic primary voting and garnered a total of 3.5 million votes, 18.2 percent of the total. He won 5 primaries. In 1988, Jackson made a second presidential run. This time he was better financed and organized. He more than doubled his previous results and finished second in the Democratic primaries to Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Jackson won 6.9 million votes, winning 7 primaries and 4 caucuses.

While Jackson declined to run for the U.S. presidency again, he's continued to push for African American rights. There's no denying his impact on American politics and civil rights. In 2000 President Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That same year he received a Master of Divinity degree from the Chicago Theological Seminary.