Goodbye to Jesse Jackson.

"Jesse Jackson, a leading African American voice on global stage, dies at 84/As a civil rights activist, he joined the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, and Memphis. He later launched two historic presidential campaigns" (WaPo)(gift link).

Here's Meade's video of him, from 2011, at the Wisconsin protests:

And here's my photo of a button that I still have right here on my desk and that I wore in 1988:

Discussed in an old diavlog, here, back in 2007, when Obama was first running for President.

From the Washington Post obituary: 

His drive and passion... brought him detractors. At times, he annoyed King, and he feuded with other King aides, some of whom considered him a shameless self-promoter.

Like many who knew him well, Roger Wilkins found Rev. Jackson both inspiring and exasperating. As an editorial writer for The Washington Post in the 1970s, Wilkins had to deal with Rev. Jackson as a frequent, and often uninvited, visitor.

“He would just show up,” Wilkins said. “It was, ‘Rev. Jackson with Dr. So-and-So is downstairs to see you.’ He wanted his name in the paper.” 

In 1968, Wilkins, as a young African American official in the Justice Department, walked the streets of Washington amid the rioting that followed King’s assassination. He made his way to 14th Street NW, where Rev. Jackson was speaking to an angry crowd.

“It’s not Black pride to burn down a Black man’s store,” Wilkins recalled Rev. Jackson saying. After a while, the anger subsided, and the crowd began to drift away. “I saw it with my own eyes,” Wilkins said. “He really did preach the violence out of those people.”