Jesse Jackson says he has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader and former presidential candidate, announced Friday that he has Parkinson’s disease.
Jackson, 76, said he had found it “increasingly difficult to perform routine tasks” and get around in recent years. After initially resisting due to his work, Jackson said, he relented and sought medical testing.
“Recognition of the effects of this disease on me has been painful, and I have been slow to grasp the gravity of it,” Jackson said in a statement released through the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, his social change group. “For me, a Parkinson’s diagnosis is not a stop sign but rather a signal that I must make lifestyle changes and dedicate myself to physical therapy in hopes of slowing the disease’s progression.”
Jackson was diagnosed with the disease in 2015, according to a statement released by Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. “Since that time, Northwestern has been treating Rev. Jackson in an outpatient setting.”
Jackson remains an active presence in American life and politics. Last year, he shuttled across the country speaking and registering people to vote, saying that people “are very motivated when we are inspired.”
He is one of the bestknown and influential activists of the civil rights era, extending the movement into national politics with his presidential campaigns in the 1980s that have since been viewed as paving the way for former president Barack Obama’s election as the first black president in 2008. Jackson’s efforts added millions of African-Americans to the voter rolls and increased the influence of black political leaders and strategists in the Democratic Party.
In 1988, during his second bid for the Democratic nomination, Jackson finished second to Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Ron Brown, who led Jackson’s team at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, later became the party’s first African-American chairman. Former president Bill Clinton appointed Brown as the first black secretary of the Commerce Department. He was killed in a plane while in office.
Jackson surprised many political observers that he was able to get support from some workingclass whites with an economic message not unlike the one that the insurgent campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., in last year’s Democratic presidential primary.