22 February 2026 :
February 17, 2026 - USA. Rev. Jesse Jackson, Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 84
Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr., a Baptist minister, 2-time presidential candidate, and outspoken critic of the death penalty, died on February 17, 2026, at age 84. His family announced that he died peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones. Rev. Jackson had been living with Parkinson’s disease since his diagnosis in 2015.
Rev. Jackson brought sustained public attention to the death penalty across several decades, arguing its use was inseparable from questions of race and economic inequality. He drew on his background as a civil rights leader and as a minister steeped in the moral traditions of the Baptist church and questioned the morality and purpose of the U.S.’s sustained use of the death penalty.
He addressed that question most directly in his 1996 book, Legal Lynching: Racism, Injustice, and the Death Penalty. The title drew an explicit connection between the extrajudicial racial violence that defined much of American history and what Rev. Jackson characterized as its institutional successor: a capital punishment system applied disproportionately along lines of race, class, and geography. In the book’s opening chapter, he wrote: “We have always had two systems of justice in America, one for the wealthy and one for the poor. We have also had a double standard for the criminal justice system, one for whites and one for people of color.” The book examined wrongful convictions, questioned the empirical basis for deterrence arguments, and documented the structural factors that shaped who ends up on death row. A revised and expanded edition, Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America’s Future, was published in 2001, co-authored with his son Jesse Jackson Jr. and journalist Bruce Shapiro.
Rev. Jackson’s engagement with the death penalty extended well beyond his writing. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, he was present at executions he believed to be unjust, including hosting vigils outside the Huntsville, Texas prison unit. He connected his anti-death penalty work to the broader mission of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the Chicago-based organization he founded, which framed capital punishment as one expression of a wider pattern of racial and economic disadvantage in the American legal system.
Following news of Rev. Jackson’s death, tributes came from across the public sphere. The Rev. Al Sharpton called him one of the country’s greatest moral voices.” Former President Barack Obama wrote that he and Michelle Obama were “deeply saddened to hear” of Rev. Jackson’s death, and that they “stood on his shoulders.” Jesse Jackson Jr. said of his father: “If his life becomes a turning point in our national political discourse, amen…His last breath is not his last breath.”
