(LifeSiteNews) — Rev. Jesse Jackson, who led the civil rights movement for years after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has died at age 84.
Jackson, a two-time Democratic contender for the U.S. presidency – who likely paved the way for Barack Obama to take the White House – was once an outspoken pro-life advocate who famously argued that abortion is “genocide.”
A gifted orator and activist, Jackson urged the 1988 Democratic National Convention attendees to “keep hope alive,” a refrain that two decades later echoed in Obama’s 2008 slogan calling for “hope and change.”
Before becoming pro-abortion, Jackson was staunchly pro-life
“The Civil Rights icon … was conceived in (statutory) rape. Many don’t realize that he was once passionately pro-life,” noted pro-life activist Ryan Scott Bomberger, founder of the Radiance Foundation, upon learning of Jackson’s passing. “Sadly, that changed when he ran for President on the Democratic ticket in 1984.”
“In 1975, he helped establish what is now Care Net, a network of thousands of life-saving, life-changing pregnancy care centers,” Bomberger said. “He even worked with Ruth Graham, wife of Rev. Billy Graham, to try to pass a constitutional amendment to ban abortion.”
In a 1973 Jet Magazine article on abortion in the Black community, Jackson explained:
Abortion is genocide. If people use preventive measures to stop the life process from originating, I can buy that … But if they get carried enough away to set the baby in process, they must get carried enough away to accept the responsibility of the baby.
And I don’t want to hear this bit about babies not really living until the baby has a face and the doctor smacks it and it cries. Anything growing is living … If you got the thrill to set the baby in motion and you don’t have the will to protect it, you’re dishonest … But you don’t try to stop reproducing and procreating human life at its best. For who knows the cure for cancer won’t come out of some mind of some Black child?”
“The question of ‘life’ is The Question of the 20th century,” Jackson declared in an article he penned for Right to Life News in 1977. “Race and poverty are dimensions of the life question, but discussions about abortion have brought the issue into focus in a much sharper way. How we will respect and understand the nature of life itself is the over-riding moral issue, not of the Black race, but of the human race.”
“Life is the highest good and therefore you fight for life, using means consistent with that end,” Jackson wrote. “Life is the highest human good not on its own naturalistic merits, but because life is supernatural, a gift from God. Therefore, life is the highest human good because life is sacred.”
“Human beings cannot give or create life by themselves, it is really a gift from God. Therefore, one does not have the right to take away (through abortion) that which he does not have the ability to give,” Jackson said.
“Advocates of taking life prior to birth do not call it killing or murder; they call it abortion,” he pointed out. “They further never talk about aborting a baby because that would imply something human. Rather they talk about aborting the fetus. Fetus sounds less than human and therefore can be justified.”
‘I am somebody’
Through a poem he famously often repeated, Jackson taught those who felt oppressed, “I am Somebody.”
Jackson led everyone from Sesame Street kids to tens of thousands packing the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for the Wattstax Music Festival in 1972: “I may be poor, but I am Somebody; I may be young; but I am Somebody; I may be on welfare, but I am Somebody.”
“Our father was a servant leader – not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in an online statement. “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family.”
“I knew him well, long before becoming President. He was a good man, with lots of personality, grit, and ‘street smarts,’” President Donald Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “He was very gregarious – someone who truly loved people!”
“He loved his family greatly, and to them I send my deepest sympathies and condolences,” Trump added.
Jesse Louis Jackson was born on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina. He was the son of high school student Helen Burns and a married man, Noah Louis Robinson. Jackson was later adopted by Charles Henry Jackson after he married his mother.
Jackson was a star quarterback in high school who went on to play quarterback at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, an historically Black university (HBCU), in Greensboro. While there, Jackson emerged as a young civil rights leader.
In 1965, Jackson joined Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s voting rights march and then continued to work with King until his assassination in 1968.
Jackson announced in 2017 he was undergoing treatment for Parkinson’s disease. He was later diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare life-threatening disease.
“Suppose one is so hard-hearted and so in-different to life until he assumes that there is nothing for which to be forgiven. What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of a person, and what kind of a society will we have 20 years hence if life can be taken so casually?” Jackson asked in 1977 regarding those who commit abortions.
“It is that question, the question of our attitude, our value system, and our mindset with regard to the nature and worth of life itself that is the central question confronting mankind,” Jackson said. “Failure to answer that question affirmatively may leave us with a hell right here on earth.”