Jesse Jackson

Jesse Jackson

Jesse Jackson is an African-American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as shadow senator for the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1997. He was the founder of both entities that merged to form Rainbow/PUSH.

Articles by this author

The Statue of Liberty. (Photo: USA Pyron/Dreamstime.com.) Views
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
The Significance of the 1619 Project
On Sunday, the New York Times unveiled “ The 1619 Project ,” a journalistic series in the Sunday magazine that seeks to tell the “unvarnished truth” about slavery and its impact on America’s history. In 1619, just 12 years after the founding of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas...
Read more
Three of the Walmart workers, Melisa Gonzalez, Jesus Romero and Raven Ramos, who helped people to escape during a mass shooting occurred on Saturday, get emotional during a vigil at Ponder Park in honor to the victims in El Paso on Sunday, August 4, 2019. (Photo: Lola Gomez/American-Statesman) Views
Wednesday, August 07, 2019
First Look in the Mirror, Mr. President, to Quell America’s Deadly Violence
The horrifying and heartbreaking news of the domestic terrorist attacks in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, in less than 24 hours over the weekend reached me while I was in Poland, a country haunted by the deadly power of politically irresponsible and racist rhetoric. I was participating in a...
Read more
The U.S. soccer team waged a battle not only on the field, writes Jesse Jackson, but in the court of public opinion. (Photo: Getty) Views
Tuesday, July 09, 2019
‘Equal Pay, Equal Pay, Equal Pay’
As the exhausted and thrilled U.S. women’s soccer team celebrated its victory in the finals of the 2019 Women’s World Cup, the cheers of the crowd in the Stade of Lyon soon turned into a chant: “Equal Pay, Equal Pay, Equal Pay.” Even as they fought their way to the fourth U.S. Women World Cup...
Read more
Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) addresses the Moral Action Congress of the Poor People's Campaign June 17, 2019 at Trinity Washington University in Washington, DC. The Campaign held the event to focus on issues like “voting rights, health care, housing, equitable education, indigenous sovereignty, living wage jobs and the right to join a union, clean air and water, and an end to gun proliferation and war mongering and other issues in our moral agenda.” (Photo by Alex Wong/G Views
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Mobilizing the Poor People’s Campaign
This week in Washington, the powers that be heard from a vital new democratic force in this country. For three days, the Poor People’s Campaign brought poor and low-wage Americans to the nation’s capital to call for a moral renewal in this nation. They questioned many of those who are seeking the...
Read more
Student debt—now at about $1.6 trillion—is greater than the amount owed to credit cards or in auto loans. (Photo: ©Arenacreative/Dreamstime.com) Views
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Bring Troops Home and Send More Kids to College
Nuts. There may be fancier words to describe President Donald Trump’s latest lunacy—but just plain"nuts” is most accurate. There may be fancier words to describe President Donald Trump’s latest lunacy—but just plain"nuts” is most accurate. The president decided, overnight, that he wanted the United...
Read more
President Donald Trump speaks in late May in support of farmers and ranchers hurt by the ongoing U.S.-China trade war. Farmers hurt by Trump’s tariffs will get additional $16 billion bailout to those most affected. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Views
Tuesday, June 04, 2019
Donald Trump Confuses Bluster With Strength on Trade
For Donald Trump, America First is increasingly translating into America alone. He apparently believes that the United States is so dominant that it needs no friends. Trump prefers to act alone, often on impulse, in conflicts across the globe. He views allies as a burden, international law as an...
Read more
Melissa Simpson holds up her arm with "My Body My Choice" written on it during a protest against recently passed abortion ban bills at the Georgia State Capitol building, on May 21, 2019 in Atlanta, United States. The bill would ban abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected. The Alabama abortion law, signed by Gov. Kay Ivey last week, includes no exceptions for cases of rape and incest, outlawing all abortions except when necessary to prevent serious health problems for the woman. Though women are exempt Views
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Extremist Laws Will Make It Harder for Poor Women to End Pregnancies
Alabama — led by utterly clueless male legislators — just passed the most restrictive ban on abortion in the country, with Georgia and Missouri piling on. Other states dominated by right-wing Republican politicians are jockeying to join in. Their aim is to get the courts, newly packed with right-...
Read more
Today, the common sense of the Brown decision is under attack. (Photo: Multicultural America. | Illustration by ©Boarding1now/Dreamstime.com) Views
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
65 years after Brown v. Board of Education, We Risk Going Backward
This week marks the 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous Supreme Court decision that outlawed apartheid in America, declaring segregated schools “inherently unequal” and unconstitutional. Today, the common sense of the Brown decision is under attack. For nearly three...
Read more
White House National Security Advisor John Bolton talks to reporters about the security and political turmoil in Venezuela and called for a peaceful transition to a government controlled by acting President Juan Guaido, outside of the White House West Wing on Tuesday, April 30, 2019 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/TNS) Views
Thursday, May 09, 2019
President Trump’s Insatiable Appetite for Regime Change
Push is coming to shove in Venezuela . President Donald Trump has decided that the government of President Nicolás Maduro must go. Senior officials—led by John Bolton, Trump’s super-hawk national security adviser, and Elliott Abrams, stained by his cover-up and lies about death squads in El...
Read more
In Wisconsin, Jesse Jackson writes, voter suppression laws have been passed by a conservative Republican legislature despite the fact that there is no evidence of voter fraud to justify them. (Photo: Karie Angell Luc~for Sun-Times Media) Views
Thursday, May 02, 2019
GOP, Not Russia, Is Greater Threat to Free Elections
We all have heard about WikiLeaks and Russian interference in the 2016 election. The report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller has once more put that on the front pages. Too often lost in the furor, however, is the far more damaging TrikiLeaks — the tricks and laws used to suppress the vote by...
Read more

Pages