Jesse Jackson to Step Down From Rainbow PUSH Coalition

The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., the longtime civil rights leader and former Democratic presidential candidate, plans to step down as president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the organization he founded, the group said in a statement on Friday.

Mr. Jackson, 81, who has had several health issues in recent years and announced in 2017 that he had Parkinson’s disease, spoke about the decision on the organization’s weekly radio broadcast on Saturday, Fox 32 Chicago reported.

“I’m going to make a transition pretty soon,” Mr. Jackson said, according to the news station. “I’ve been doing this stuff for 64 years. I was 18 years old. I’m going to get a new president for Rainbow PUSH Coalition.”

He said he would work with the new president and the board through the change. “I want to see us grow and prosper,” he said, adding: “We have the ability to build on what we’ve established over the years.”

The Rainbow PUSH Coalition said in a statement that a successor to Mr. Jackson would be introduced at its annual convention, which is being held this weekend in Chicago and includes a celebration of the 35th anniversary of his 1988 presidential campaign.

Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to address the convention on Sunday.

In the statement announcing Mr. Jackson’s decision to step down, the organization said: “His commitment is unwavering, and he will elevate his life’s work by teaching ministers how to fight for social justice and continue the freedom movement.”

Mr. Jackson has been a stalwart figure in the civil rights movement since he was a teenager in the 1960s. He worked with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988.

He founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in 1996 as a result of a merger between two groups he had previously started.

He began Operation PUSH, or People United to Save Humanity, in 1971, with the goal of improving the economic conditions of Black communities across the United States. The group later changed the word “Save” to “Serve.”

The other group was the Rainbow Coalition, which Mr. Jackson started in 1984 after his first presidential campaign. That group opposed President Reagan’s domestic spending cuts and sought greater investments in American cities, particularly in minority communities.

In 2017, Mr. Jackson announced that he had Parkinson’s disease. He said that he and his family had noticed three years earlier that he was having increasing difficulty performing routine tasks.

In early 2021, he underwent gallbladder surgery after experiencing “abdominal discomfort,” a spokesman told The Associated Press. Later that year, Mr. Jackson and his wife, Jacqueline, were hospitalized after testing positive for the coronavirus.

One of his sons, Representative Jonathan L. Jackson, Democrat of Illinois, told The Chicago Sun-Times that there was “a determination made that in his current health and condition that he has appointed a successor and will formally announce it Sunday.”

He said that his father’s Parkinson’s was “progressive” and that he had been using a wheelchair.

Mr. Jackson, his son said, “has forever been on the scene of justice and has never stopped fighting for civil rights,” and that would be “his mark upon history.”