The Rev. Jesse Jackson, powerful voice for Black equality, is hospitalized
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the trailblazing civil rights leader, was hospitalized in Chicago on Wednesday with symptoms resulting from the neurodegenerative condition progressive supranuclear palsy.
His hospitalization was confirmed in a statement by the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a social justice organization founded by Jackson.
The 84-year-old Baptist minister and political figure has been struggling with the neurodegenerative condition for more than a decade, according to the statement. He was initially diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, but his PSP diagnosis was confirmed in April.
PSP is an atypical Parkinson’s diseaseIt is a group of neurodegenerative disorders that resemble Parkinson’s disease in some motor symptoms but typically progress more rapidly and have a grave prognosis.
A rare brain disease, it results from a buildup of tau protein in areas of the brain that control body movements, causing increasingly degenerative symptoms such as balance problems, inability to aim the eyes, slurred speech, loss of walking, and difficulty swallowing.
Jackson was previously hospitalized with his wife for Covid-19 in 2021.
The civil rights leader was born in segregated Greenville, S.C., in 1941 and married the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. came to the fore with.
He advocated for companies to hire more Black Americans through Operation PUSH and founded the Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s to unite marginalized groups and working-class voters around common goals of social, economic and political justice, as well as greater political representation. He became the first Black presidential candidate to receive major national support, garnering 3.5 million votes in 1984 and 7 million in 1988.
