Remembering Reverend Jesse Jackson
Photo by Anthony Suau/The Denver Post
Black History Month is a time when we honor the giants who shaped the course of this nation. This year, we are mourning one.
Reverend Jesse Jackson passed away at 84, leaving behind a legacy that stretched from the segregated classrooms of the Jim Crow South to the national stage of presidential politics. He was a civil rights champion. He stood beside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at pivotal moments in history. He founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. He ran for President of the United States twice when the path to power was steep and unforgiving.
Losing him during Black History Month feels especially heavy because he wasn’t just part of the history. He is Black history.
Before he became a national figure, he was an HBCU student. The moral clarity, political courage, and strategic discipline that defined his career were cultivated on an HBCU campus.
Via NCAT.edu
From Segregation to HBCU Education
Jesse Jackson was born and raised in the Jim Crow South. He grew up riding in the back of the bus, drinking from “colored” water fountains, and navigating a world that told him his skin determined his worth.
He never accepted that message.
In 1960, he participated in a student-led “read-in” at a segregated public library. For demanding access to books, he was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Even as a young man, he understood something powerful: education is leverage. A cultivated mind cannot be easily contained.
He began his college career at the University of Illinois on a football scholarship. He had the talent. What he did not have was equal opportunity. Racism limited his playing time and blocked him from competing for the quarterback position, and no one was going to do anything about it.
So he left.
He transferred to North Carolina A&T State University, and that decision changed everything.
In the 1960s, HBCUs were incubators for social activists. They were the heart of the movement. Jackson entered an environment built to develop Black leadership, and he thrived there. He continued playing football, was elected student body president, and earned his Bachelor of Arts in Sociology in 1964. At NC A&T, he was able to hone his voice, develop his leadership skills, and learn how effective systems functioned from the inside.
North Carolina A&T became Jackson’s training ground. The Greensboro sit-ins had ignited there only a few years earlier, and the campus still carried the momentum of organized resistance. Jackson was no stranger to civil disobedience, but at NC A&T, he joined a community of students who treated activism as a responsibility. He was surrounded by disciplined thinkers and emerging leaders who understood that education and protest worked hand in hand.
via Bob Fitch photography archive, © Stanford University Libraries
HBCUs as Political Training Grounds
After graduating from North Carolina A&T in 1964, Jackson enrolled at Chicago Theological Seminary. He was serious about ministry, but he was even more serious about justice.
He did not finish seminary.
Instead, he chose a more hands-on path. He followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into full-time movement work, stepping directly into the heat of the Civil Rights Movement. When Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, Jackson was there. At just 26 years old, he stood in the middle of a national tragedy and a cultural turning point.
But Jackson was ready to pick up the mantle. He was young, but he brought with him the discipline of student government, the organizing instincts sharpened on an HBCU campus, and a sociological training that helped him understand how systems of poverty and discrimination actually functioned.
As the national director of Operation Breadbasket, he pressured corporations to hire Black workers and invest in Black communities. He focused on creating employment pipelines and expanding supplier diversity. He understood that economic justice and educational access were inseparable. Without strong schools and college pathways, opportunity narrows quickly.
Jackson consistently advocated for funding and visibility for Black colleges. He understood their importance because he was a product of it. Institutions founded during Reconstruction and sustained through segregation had become engines of Black middle-class growth, civic leadership, and political power. They trained ministers, teachers, lawyers, and organizers who shaped communities across the country.
When HBCUs are underfunded, entire communities feel the impact. Jackson never lost sight of that. His activism was national, but his understanding of leadership was rooted in the unique impact of HBCUs.
Rainbow PUSH and Educational Equity
When Jackson founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a progressive, international membership organization fighting for social change, he formalized his commitment to political empowerment and economic justice. The coalition advocated for expanded access to higher education, minority business participation, and equitable federal investment.
He consistently elevated the role of HBCUs in producing civic leaders, ministers, educators, and policymakers. He visited campuses, spoke at commencements, and framed HBCUs as pillars of American democracy.
Instead of treating HBCUs as sentimental symbols, he highlighted the crucial role they play in enriching the Black communities.
HBCUs have produced a significant percentage of Black doctors, lawyers, engineers, judges, and members of Congress. Jackson’s own life reflected that trajectory. A sociology degree earned on an HBCU campus became the foundation for national leadership.
He connected federal policy directly to what happens on campus. Student aid, Pell Grants, and access to graduate education were not abstract policy debates. They were the structural supports that determine whether HBCU students can stay enrolled, graduate, and step into leadership.
via The Washington Post
A Presidential Campaign That Changed the Game
In November 1983, Jackson announced his candidacy for President of the United States. He declared, “I seek the presidency to serve the nation at a level where I can help restore a moral tone, a redemptive spirit, and a sensitivity to the poor and the dispossessed of this nation.”
He ran twice.
At the time, a Black presidential candidate was considered improbable at best and impossible at worst. Jackson ran anyway. His campaigns registered millions of new voters and built multiracial coalitions grounded in economic justice and expanded access to education.
HBCU campuses became organizing centers. Students canvassed neighborhoods, debated policy, and saw someone who looked like them standing on a national debate stage. For many, this was not abstract inspiration. It was proximity. A graduate of North Carolina A&T was competing for the highest office in the country.
That shift altered the political landscape.
Jackson proved that a Black candidate could mount a serious national campaign, win delegates, and command a coalition broad enough to influence party platforms. He expanded the electorate and normalized the idea that presidential leadership could emerge from spaces long dismissed as marginal.
When Barack Obama launched his campaign decades later, he entered a political arena that Jackson had helped prepare. And when Kamala Harris stood on a national debate stage and later took the oath of office as vice president, she did so in a country that had already witnessed a Black candidate claim presidential space with confidence.
Jackson’s campaigns laid the groundwork for what would happen decades later, and for HBCU students watching in the 1980s, the message was unmistakable. The yard was just the beginning. HBCUs were preparation for the highest levels of leadership.
Carrying the Legacy Forward
Reverend Jesse Jackson’s passing marks the loss of a leader who helped define an era of American history.
His story reinforces what HBCU communities already know. When Black students are educated in spaces that affirm their intellect and cultivate their leadership, the results ripple far beyond campus gates.
At HBCU Leggings, we honor that lineage.
We celebrate institutions that trained leaders like Jesse Jackson. We celebrate the yards where students organize, debate, and dream beyond imposed ceilings. We celebrate the classrooms that shape courage.
Reverend Jesse Jackson’s life began in segregated schools and expanded through an HBCU campus. It carried forward into national policy, presidential campaigns, and global recognition.
Jesse Jackson’s legacy is the evidence: Education matters. HBCUs matter. And the leaders they produce change history.
Love and Leggings,
Bibi
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bibi Mama is a first-generation Beninese-American actress born and raised in Mansfield, CT. Growing up she watched her father, an English professor and author, continue the Yoruba oral tradition through storytelling, which inspired her. She earned her B.F.A. from Howard University and recently finished her MFA at the Old Globe/University of San Diego MFA Graduate Acting Program.