Jesse Louis Jackson (born October 8, 1941) is an American politician, civil rights activist, and Baptist minister. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, and is a prominent leader of the American Christian left. He is the father of Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr.

Jesse Louis Burns (Burns being his mother's last name) was born on October 8, 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina to a lower middle-class household. Noah Robinson, his biological father, was a successful black businessman who was married to another woman. Later, his mother married Charles Henry Jackson, who formally adopted him in 1957. Jackson played football in high school and at both of the universities that he attended. At the age of twenty one, he married Jacqueline Lavinia Brown on December 31, 1962. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and graduated from North Carolina A&T University. As a graduate student, Jesse studied divinity at the Chicago Theological Seminary (he did not complete the degree at the time but was later awarded a Master of Divinity in 2000 based on life experience).

In 1965, Jesse Jackson participated in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s movement in Selma, Alabama. When Jackson returned from Selma, he threw himself into King’s effort to establish a beachhead of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Chicago. In 1966, King selected Jackson to be head of the SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, and promoted him to be the national director in 1967. Following the example of Reverend Leon Sullivan of Philadelphia, a key goal of the new group was to foster “selective buying” (boycotts) as a means to pressure white businesses to hire blacks and purchase goods and services from black contractors. One of Sullivan's precursors was Dr.T.R.M. Howard, a wealthy South Side doctor and entrepreneur and key financial contributor to Operation Breadbasket. Before he moved to Chicago from Mississippi in 1956, Howard, as the head of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, had successfully organized a boycott against service stations that refused to provide restrooms for blacks.

Jackson was present with King in Memphis when he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, the day after making his famous "I’ve been to the mountaintop" speech given to the Mason Temple, Church of God in Christ.

Beginning in 1968, Jackson increasingly clashed with Ralph Abernathy, King's successor as head of the national SCLC. In December, 1971, they had a complete falling out. Abernathy suspended Jackson for “administrative improprieties and repeated acts of violation of organizational policy.” Jackson resigned, called together his allies, and Operation PUSH was born during the same month. The new group was organized in the home of Dr. T.R.M. Howard who also became a member of the board of directors and chair of the finance committee.

In 1984, Jackson organized the Rainbow Coalition, which later merged, in 1996, with Operation PUSH.

In 1984, Jackson became the second African American (after Shirley Chisholm) to mount a nationwide campaign for President of the United States, running as a Democrat.

In the primaries, Jackson, who had been written off by pundits as a fringe candidate with little chance at winning the nomination, surprised many when he took third place behind Senator Gary Hart and former Vice President Walter Mondale, who eventually won the nomination. Jackson garnered 3.5 million votes and won five primaries, including Michigan.

As he had gained 21% of the popular vote but only 8% of delegates, he afterwards complained that he had been handicapped by party rules. While Mondale (in the words of his aides) was determined to establish a precedent with his vice presidential candidate by picking a woman or visible minority, Jackson criticized the screening process as a "p.r. parade of personalities". He also mocked Mondale, saying that Hubert Humphrey was the "last significant politician out of the St. Paul–Minneapolis" area.

Four years later, in 1988, Jackson once again offered himself as a candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. This time, his successes in the past made him a more credible candidate, and he was both better financed and better organized. Although most people did not seem to believe that he had a serious chance at winning, Jackson once again exceeded expectations as he more than doubled his previous results, capturing 6.9 million votes and winning eleven primaries. Briefly, after he won 55% of the vote in the Michigan Democratic caucus, he was considered the frontrunner for the nomination, as he surpassed all the other candidates in total number of pledged delegates.

Jackson's campaign, however, suffered a signifcant set back less than two weeks later when he was defeated handily in Wisconsin primary by Michael Dukakis. Jackson's showing among white voters in Wisconsin was signifcantly higher than in his 1984 run, but was also noticeably lower than pre-primary polling had indicated it would be. The discrepancy has been cited as an example of the so-called "Bradley effect".

On the heels of Jackson's narrow loss to Dukakis the day before in Colorado, Dukakis' comfortable win in Wisconsin terminated Jackson's momentum. The victory established Dukakis as the clear Democratic frontrunner, and he went on to claim the party's nomination.

Jesse Jackson’s most recent project related to presidential politics was gathering information and support to investigate the 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy, particularly the voting results in Ohio and its recount. Jackson called for a congressional debate on the matter, asking for a fair count and national voting standards. He said that the elections in the United States are each run with different standards by different states with partisan tricks, racial bias, and widespread incompetence and are an open scandal. Jackson said that he held some hope that the election could be overturned, although he admitted that that was very doubtful. Jackson compared the voting irregularities of Ohio to that of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, saying that if Ohio were Ukraine, the U.S. presidential election would not have been certified by the international community. Jackson has called Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell inappropriately partisan and said that Blackwell may have been pressured by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney to deliver Ohio to the United States Republican Party. Based on information obtained in hearings held by Rep. John Conyers (Detroit, Michigan) and discovered during a flawed recount of the Ohio presidential vote called for by Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik, Jackson suggested that the Ohio voting machines were "rigged" and that some African-Americans were forced to stand in line for six hours in the rain before voting. When asked for evidence, Jackson did not give facts, but replied, "Based on distrusting the system, lack of paper trails, the anomaly of the exit polls." On January 6, 2005, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff released a 100 page report on the Ohio election. This challenge to the Ohio election was rejected by a vote of 1-74 by the United States Senate and 31-267 in the House. Many high-ranking Democrats chose to distance themselves from this debate, including John Kerry, despite Jesse Jackson personally asking Kerry for help. The call for election reform legislation and voting rights protection nonetheless continued from various citizen groups.

While Jesse Jackson was initially critical of the "third way" or more moderate policies of Bill Clinton, he became a key ally in gaining African American support for Clinton and eventually became a close advisor and friend of the Clinton family. Clinton awarded Jesse Jackson the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest honor bestowed on civilians. His son, Jesse Jackson, Jr., also emerged as a political figure, becoming a member of the United States House of Representatives from Illinois. Jackson is also known as a passionate orator, in the tradition of Southern U.S. and African American Protestant preaching. In 2003, Jackson surprised many observers by declining to endorse the campaigns of either the Reverend Al Sharpton or former Senator Carol Moseley Braun, the two African-American candidates in the race for the Democratic Party's 2004 presidential nomination. Instead, Jackson remained largely silent about his preference in the race until late in the primary season, when he allowed Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, another presidential candidate, to speak at a Rainbow/PUSH forum on March 31, 2004. Although he did not explicitly voice an endorsement of Rep. Kucinich, Jackson described Kucinich as "assuming the burden of saying 'you make the most sense, but you can't win.'" He also writes for The Progressive Populist. In 2005, he was enlisted as part of the United Kingdom's "Operation Black Vote", a campaign to encourage more of Britain's ethnic minorities to vote in political elections ahead of the May 2005 General Election. Also in early 2005, Jackson visited the parents of Terri Schiavo and their supporters; he supported their unsuccessful bid to keep the disabled Florida woman alive. In March 2006, Crystal Gail Mangum had accused three men of the Duke University Men's Lacrosse team of raping her. Jackson had agreed to pay the rest of her college tuition regardless of the outcome of the case.

Jackson has taken a key role in the scandal caused by comedic actor Michael Richards' racially charged comments in November 2006. Richards called Jackson a few days after the incident to apologize, to which Jackson accepted Richards' apology and met with him publicly as a means of resolving the situation. Despite this, however, Jackson called for a ban on purchase of the newly released Season 7 DVD of Seinfeld, a TV show in which Richards starred. Many spectators considered this action both deceptive and irrelevant to the situation. Jackson also joined black leaders in a call for the elimination of the "N-word" throughout the entertainment industry.

Jackson has been criticized for some of the remarks he has made about Jews and Jewish issues: that Nixon was less attentive to poverty in the U.S. because "four out of five [of Nixon's top advisors] are German Jews and their priorities are on Europe and Asia"; that he was "sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust"; that there are "very few Jewish reporters that have the capacity to be objective about Arab affairs"; In addition Rev. Jackson had referred to Jews as "Hymies" and to New York City as "Hymietown" in January 1984 during a conversation with Washington Post reporter, Milton Coleman.