I first met Jacqueline Jackson many decades ago at the Chicago Urban League’s Golden Fellowship Event at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Both of us, in our early twenties, had ducked into the ladies’ room to touch up our lipstick. We got into a conversation about children. We each had one child and she told me that she planned to have four more. Our paths have crossed often since then, most recently both of us promising to purchase each other’s books.
Jacqueline Jackson is known to many as the wife of Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. and the First Lady of Operation Breadbasket, Rainbow PUSH coalition and the 1988 DNC. She is known in her own right as an author and speaker and true to her plan, she has raised five wonderfully successful children. But what a lot of people may not know about Jacqueline Jackson is that she is a leader and activist advocating for justice throughout the world.
Those who attend PUSH regularly may recall Reverend Jackson from time to time speaking of how his wife has hosted many dignitaries throughout the years in their home and how she has traveled with him on diplomatic missions to many foreign countries. Yet she has also taken on many foreign missions on her own; Jacqueline Jackson was one of the first, if not the first, African American women to become directly involved in trying to eliminate America’s “no talk” policy toward the Palestinian people. She led delegations of women to Palestine who, as a result, began to discuss the issues on radio talk shows and began to reach out to the Arab community. In many ways that delegation was instrumental in putting the kind of pressure on our government that ultimately ended the no-talk policy. She even urged Andrew Young, who was then America’s United Nations Ambassador, to take a firm position on the issue. Ambassador Young stood up for the cause, and following Jacqueline Jackson’s lead, he met with Yasir Arafat, which led to his resignation.
In 2001, Jackson was arrested at Camp Garcia Vieques in Vieques, Puerto Rico with nine other activists for misdemeanor trespassing while protesting the United States Navy’s bombing tests in the area. She was soon released after she began organizing the women in jail.
Jacqueline also became involved in Ethiopia’s famine. A famine which caused a lot of starvation and loss of a lot of lives.
She took a delegation of women to Ethiopia and those women subsequently appeared on radio talk shows to bring the starvation that was taking place in Ethiopia to the attention of the American public. They also went to the Department of Agriculture to pressure that department’s leadership into releasing food for people who were enduring the drought.
Throughout the years, Jacqueline has been involved, whether it was in South Africa taking a stand against Apartheid, or protesting the atrocities that were committed in El Salvador during the eighties or bringing America to place pressure on the Sandinista government under Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, she never hesitated to speak up if she felt America was taking unfair advantage of people.
She has stated that “It’s because of our tax dollars that we are in a position to prevent them from invading people, and from allowing people to starve, or demanding that they eliminate unfair policies.”
For a very long time, Mrs. Jackson has protested America’s embargos and restrictions on Cuba. She once stated that “It’s such a small country I don’t see where it can threaten the hundreds of million people living in the United States.”
Jacqueline Jackson feels that it’s all part of her lifetime commitment to teach America to be a good neighbor and to be sensitive to others, whether it’s Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico or Jamaica, Years ago, she spoke about the sanctions that the United States has placed on Venezuela, which over the years has caused the country to become literally unlivable. She rightly predicted those many years ago that as Venezuelans flee the squalor and resultant violence and come to the United States, our cities would soon be experiencing a migrant disaster.
Jacqueline Jackson continues to fight for the civil rights, freedom and equality, of all people throughout the nation and the world.
