Jesse Jackson, orig. Jesse Louis Burns, (born Oct. 8, 1941, Greenville, S.C., U.S.), U.S. civil rights leader. He became involved with the civil rights movement as a college student. In 1965 he went to Selma, Ala., to march with Martin Luther King, Jr., and began working for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1966 he helped found the Chicago branch of Operation Breadbasket, the SCLC’s economic arm; he was its national director from 1967 to 1971. Ordained a Baptist minister in 1968, he founded Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) in 1971. In 1983 he led a voter-registration drive in Chicago that helped elect the city’s first African American mayor, Harold Washington. In 1984 and 1988 Jackson entered the Democratic presidential primary, becoming the first African American man to make a serious bid for the U.S. presidency; he received 6.7 million votes in 1988. In 1989 he moved to Washington, D.C. and was elected the city’s unpaid “statehood senator” to lobby Congress for statehood. From the late 1970s Jackson gained wide attention through his attempts to mediate in various international disputes, including in the Middle East. In the late 1990s he faced allegations of financial misconduct, and in 2001 he admitted fathering a child out of wedlock.
