Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader who twice ran for president in the 1980s, has been hospitalized.
The Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, which Jackson founded, confirmed Jackson was admitted to the hospital on Wednesday, but did not provide further details on which hospital or his condition. Sources said he was taken to the hospital for observation.
Jackson was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2015, and in 2021 he was hospitalized twice with COVID-19.
Jackson also was hospitalized last month for a lung infection.
In 2023, he stepped down as head of Rainbow/PUSH, the iconic civil rights organization he founded.
Jackson created the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in 1996 as a merger of Operation PUSH and the National Rainbow Coalition, two nonprofit organizations he founded in 1971 and 1984, respectively.
Operation PUSH grew out of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation Breadbasket, a coalition of Black ministers and businessmen founded by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1962. King appointed Jackson to serve as Operation Breadbasket’s first director in Chicago.
Jackson created Operation PUSH in 1971 in an effort to improve the economic and political lives of Black Americans.
Jackson went on to found the National Rainbow Coalition in 1984, after his first run for president. The group was formed to seek equal rights for all Americans, and to demand social programs, voting rights, and affirmative action for minorities left out by “Reaganomics,” according to the Rainbow/PUSH website.
The two nonprofits merged in 1996 with Jackson at the helm.
