(b. October 8, 1941) Civil rights leader; organized PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition; active in presidential politics in the 1980s.

Jesse Louis Jackson was born in Greenville, South Carolina, and became a leading civil rights activist, preacher, and politician. Jackson attended Greenville's segregated public schools and graduated from Sterling High School. Young Jackson entered the University of Illinois on an athletic scholarship. After a year there, he transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College at Greensboro, where students had launched the sit-in movement in January 1960. In June 1963, he graduated from college just as massive civil rights demonstrations gripped Birmingham, Alabama, and other Southern cities. As leader of the campus chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, Jackson had declared his willingness to go to jail or to the chain gang if necessary. In June 1963 he led 278 civil rights demonstrators who were arrested in Greensboro.

Jackson...