Jesse Jackson, civil rights leader who rallied in Austin, dies at 84

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the influential civil rights leader who died Tuesday at 84, crisscrossed the country with his activist work — and periodically stopped in Austin.

Jackson, who ran for president twice and worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr., led a march in the mid-1990s 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’s activist work started in 1960, when he fought to desegregate a library in his hometown of Greenville, South Carolina. A few years later, King tapped Jackson to lead Operation Breadbasket, a movement to improve economic conditions for Black Americans.

Jackson’s role in advancing the civil rights movement continued after King’s assassination. He created the Rainbow PUSH Coalition (People United to Save Humanity) — a nonprofit civil rights organization based in Chicago.

Margaret Justus, who met Jackson while working for former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, said Jackson had an “enormous impact” and knew him as a man who “showed up when there was some type of crime of injustice.”

“He motivated so many young people,” Justus said. “To get involved and to speak out, use their First Amendment rights, speak out against injustice everywhere.”

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.