Jesse Jackson was the living bridge between King and Obama

He witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Forty years later, he joined the jubilant crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park to greet Barack Obama’s election victory and had tears streaming down his face.

Jesse Jackson, who died on Tuesday at the age of 84, was hailed by Martin Luther King III and his wife Andrea King as “a living bridge between generations”. He was the most influential African American political voice between King and Obama. His two runs for the Democratic nomination created the imaginative space for a Black president. He was the architect of a “rainbow coalition” that shapes the Democratic party today.

The legacy of Jackson’s commitment to expand voting rights, back marriage equality, pursue racial justice and combine a progressive agenda with Christian values lives on in figures such as Senator Raphael Warnock and Bishop William Barber and movements such as Black Lives Matter. His push to sanction apartheid South Africa, embrace Palestinian rights and oppose the Iraq war were a blueprint for the left’s foreign policy.

“My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised,” Jackson, a Baptist minister, told the 1984 Democratic national convention in San Francisco. “They are restless and seek relief.”

Jackson’s story mapped the transformation of the Democrats, and the vicissitudes of America, for more than eight decades. He was born in Greenville, South Carolina, during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, two months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

It was also the Jim Crow era of racial segregation. Jackson never forgot the first time this his mother led him to the back of a bus. On Saturday mornings he worked at a bakery that had separate water fountains for Black and white people. He once said: “I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had a shovel programmed for my hands.”

In 1960 Jackson took part in his first sit-in, in Greenville, and then joined the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights marches in 1965, where he caught King’s attention. As a young organiser in Chicago, Jackson was called to meet with King at the Lorraine motel in Memphis in 1968 and would always be haunted by the sound of the fatal gunshot.

“Every time I think about it, it’s like pulling a scab off a sore,” he told the Guardian in 2018. “It’s a hurtful, painful thought: that a man of love is killed by hate; that a man of peace should be killed by violence; a man who cared is killed by the careless.”

A political realignment was under way, with Democrats moving to embrace civil rights, culminating in President Lyndon Johnson championing the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 while Republican Richard Nixon’s 1968 “southern strategy” sought to win over white, socially conservative voters in the south.

Jackson publicly positioned himself as King’s successor. He advocated for the poor and underrepresented on issues from voting rights and job opportunities to education and healthcare. Just as King had condemned the war in Vietnam, Jackson travelled to South Africa in 1979, just after Steve Biko’s death, advocating for US sanctions on the apartheid regime and supporting Nelson Mandela’s anti-apartheid struggle.

He launched two social justice and activism organizations: Operation Push in 1971, and the National Rainbow Coalition a dozen years later. The two groups merged in 1996.

But unlike King, Jackson took the leap into party politics. He considering starting his own party in 1971. He campaigned for Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1980 and became a vital force in registering Black voters.

Despite once telling a Black audience he would not run for president “because white people are incapable of appreciating me”, in 1984 Jackson became the second Black candidate from a major party to run for president, following former congresswoman Shirley Chisholm in 1972. He finished third in the primaries behind former vice-president Walter Mondale and runner-up Gary Hart.

He ran again in 1988 and won 13 primaries and caucuses, coming second to Michael Dukakis and ensuring that African American issues became fundamental to the Democratic party platform. At the party convention, Jackson attacked what he called the “reverse Robin Hood” of a Ronald Reagan presidency that bestowed riches on the wealthy while leaving poor Americans struggling.

He later recalled: “I was able to run for the presidency twice and redefine what was possible; it raised the lid for women and other people of colour. Part of my job was to sow seeds of the possibilities.”

The Democratic congressman John Lewis said during a 1988 C-Span interview that Jackson’s two runs for the Democratic nomination “opened some doors that some minority person will be able to walk through and become president”.

On Tuesday Kamala Harris, the first Black vice-president whose presidential bid was defeated by Trump in 2024, recalled driving to law school in the 1980s in California with a “Jesse Jackson for President” bumper sticker. She wrote on X: “You would not believe how people from every walk of life would give me a thumbs up or honk of support.”

Jackson also pushed for cultural change, joining calls by NAACP members and other movement leaders in the late 1980s to identify Black people in the United States as African Americans. He said: “To be called African Americans has cultural integrity – it puts us in our proper historical context. Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some base, some historical cultural base. African Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity.”

His White House bids in the 1980s had helped lay the groundwork for the election of America’s first Black president two decades later. Jackson openly wept in the crowd as Obama celebrated his 2008 presidential election in Chicago. His legacy continues in a modern Democratic coalition that includes progressives, African Americans, Latinos and the white working class – a coalition that Donald Trump has sought to break apart.

Obama said in a statement on Tuesday: “Michelle got her first glimpse of political organizing at the Jacksons’ kitchen table when she was a teenager. And in his two historic runs for president, he laid the foundation for my own campaign to the highest office of the land … We stood on his shoulders.”