The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a highly-influential political civil rights activist, former presidential candidate and friend and partner of Martin Luther King Jr., has died at 84.
Jackson's activist work started in 1960 and frequently brought him to Austin, including speaking to former Rep. Barbara Jordan's class at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.
In the mid-1990s, Jackson led a march to the Texas Capitol to protest attempts from state and federal leaders to eliminate affirmative action, according to newspaper archives from the Austin American-Statesman. The rally took place less than a year before affirmative action for Black and Mexican American students was effectively banned at the University of Texas at Austin's School of Law in the case of Hopwood v. Texas.
Jackson continued advocating for affirmative action in Austin into the 2000s. He delivered speeches to thousands of Austin residents at Waterloo Park, Huston-Tillotson University and hosted youth voting rallies at local high schools.
In fall of 2003, Jackson sat down with the Austin Police Department to discuss repairing its relationship with the Black community after Jessie Owens, a 20-year-old Black man, was fatally shot by a white police officer.
"There must be a message to the community that there are deterrents to killing unarmed people," Jackson said in 2003 after a meeting with the police chief as reported by the Austin American-Statesman. "We will not rest until those deterrents are there. We want good community relations, but this pattern of killing must stop."
In 2021, Jackson rallied alongside Willie Nelson, Beto O' Rourke, and other Texas leaders in a four-day long protest against the Legislature's attempts to further voting restrictions.
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