There was a Thursday morning ritual in Washington, D.C., in the early 1990s that I suspect not enough people remember. Inside the sanctuary of Shiloh Baptist Church — that proud fortress of faith and justice on 9th and P Street in Northwest — the Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson would stand before a small group of the faithful, the hungry, and the politically alive, and he would remind us, with a cadence that felt like thunder and a tenderness that felt like grace, that we were somebody. That we mattered. That the doors of America's great institutions — its boardrooms, its ballot boxes, its college campuses — belonged to us, too.
Dr. Jamal Watson
It was there, in that sanctuary on Thursday mornings, that I first encountered the Reverend Al Sharpton — a young, controversial, larger-than-life figure who seemed to absorb everything Jackson said and radiate it back at twice the volume. Few could have predicted then that Sharpton would one day carry Jackson's mantle as the nation's most prominent civil rights voice. But watching them together, mentor and protégé, you could see the transmission happening in real time. A movement was being passed from one generation to the next, sermon by sermon, rally by rally.
Reverend Jesse Jackson died on Tuesday, February 17, 2026, surrounded by his family, at the age of 84. His body had been failing him for years — Parkinson's disease, then progressive supranuclear palsy, eventually robbing him of the instrument that made him: that extraordinary voice. In his final months, he communicated by squeezing the hands of those he loved. It was a painful and poignant diminishment for a man whose voice was, for more than half a century, among the most consequential in America.
To understand Jesse Jackson is to understand that his entire political and moral philosophy was rooted in a specific, personal encounter with the gates of learning, and what it felt like to be turned away from them. Growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, he was a child of segregation, forced to ride in the back of the bus, denied entry to the white-only public library when he returned home from college to retrieve a book he needed for his studies. That library incident, that moment of being literally locked out of knowledge, hardened something in him.
He enrolled at the University of Illinois on a football scholarship but left, feeling isolated and diminished, before finding his intellectual home at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. It was there, at an HBCU that the broader establishment did not fully reckon with, that Jackson's transformation occurred. Under the mentorship of university president Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor, and shaped by the intellectual giants of Dr. Benjamin Mays and Dr. Howard Thurman, Jackson became something more than a football star or a student body president. He became a revolutionary organizer. He led sit-ins, wade-ins, eat-ins. He helped desegregate Greensboro. He absorbed the idea — and never let it go for the rest of his life — that the university was not merely a place of study, but an instrument of liberation.
Reverend Al Sharpton with Dr. Jamal Watson and Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr.
