Editorial: Jackson, civil-rights icon, passes away at 84

Las Vegas Review-Journal, Las Vegas Review-Journal on Feb 18, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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In the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession in October 2009, the Rev. Jesse Jackson came to Las Vegas to deliver an address at the National Conference of Black Mayors. He also took the time to stop by the Review-Journal’s offices to sit down with the editorial board to discuss the issues of the day.

The Rev. Jackson had sought the Democratic presidential nomination twice during the 1980s and was a high-profile liberal activist — a “progressive” long before the term came into general use. Yet he sought to find common ground with a publication that long had championed smaller government, lower taxes and various Republican causes.

He was charismatic, respectful and intellectually sharp yet surprisingly low key given his dynamic public persona. “His top concerns were the same as ours — jobs and foreclosures,” Thomas Mitchell, the Review-Journal’s editor, wrote at the time. “Las Vegas leads the nation in the rate of foreclosures and the official unemployment rate is bumping at 14 percent.”

The Rev. Jackson allowed that tax relief could be a valuable part of any stimulus package proposed by the new president, Barack Obama. “Maybe the Rev. Jackson and the editorial board of the Review-Journal are not so far apart after all,” Mr. Mitchell concluded.

The Rev. Jackson died Tuesday morning in Chicago. He was 84 years old and had suffered from various ailments — Parkinson’s disease and progressive supranuclear palsy — in recent years. He was for nearly four decades beginning in the 1970s the most prominent and important Black civil rights crusader in the United States.

His influence was felt throughout the American fabric. In addition to his two presidential runs — in 1984 and 1988 — the Rev. Jackson formed the Rainbow PUSH Coalition to promote economic advancement for Black Americans in corporate boardrooms and other economic endeavors.

“Jesse Jackson played as central a role in his era as King did in his era,” Clayborne Carson, a Stanford history professor and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, told The New York Times. “But it was not the kind of heroic struggle as in the 1960s. You’re not going to get a Nobel Prize for what Jesse Jackson did, but it took a lot of talent, initiative, energy, imagination and charisma, and he had those in full supply.’’

The Rev. Jackson could be a polarizing figure and was embroiled in his share of controversies. But he was a passionate man committed to what he felt was right and recognizing that progress requires consensus, cooperation and compromise. History will remember him with respect.