Jesse Jackson’s vision for America embraced environmental justice

Peggy Shepard walked into her living room Tuesday morning when her husband told her that Jesse Jackson, the South Carolina civil rights titan, had died. “Immediately, the tears started flowing,” said Shepard, co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a New York-based nonprofit.

Nearly 40 years ago, Jackson changed the course of Shepard’s life. In the late 1980s, she was working as an editor at Time-Life Books, when a colleague mentioned an organizational meeting of Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. “I walked into that Saturday meeting and walked out on the air,” Shepard recalled. “Two hours later, I’m the Jackson campaign press secretary in Manhattan.”

This campaign – which would prove revolutionary for Shepard and the country – brought to the forefront issues rarely centered in national politics. Jackson made environmental justice, a term Americans were largely unfamiliar with at the time, a key plank of his second presidential campaign. He called for a national energy policy that would make offshore oil drilling obsolete, a plan to phase out nuclear power, measures to reduce pollution from car exhaust, a conservation strategy to restore the nation’s wetlands and forests, and a federally sponsored workforce in the style of the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps. (The Biden administration launched a similar program, the American Climate Corps, in 2024, but halted it days before President Trump returned to office last year.)

“Being part of the Jesse Jackson campaign led to everything I’m doing right now,” Shepard said of the volunteer work that took her across New York City and exposed her to stark disparities between neighborhoods, including pollution. “If I hadn’t gone to that meeting on Saturday, I’m not sure I would be sitting here today in this position.”

Jackson marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., transformed American politics with his two historic presidential campaigns, and inspired countless organizers – including environmental justice advocates – along the way. In his later years, he began to make connections between segregation in Greenville, South Carolina, where he was born, and toxic drinking water in Flint, Michigan.

He died Tuesday at his home on the south side of Chicago, surrounded by his family. He was 84 years old. Jackson had been in poor health since a Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2015, which was later revised to progressive supranuclear palsy, a neurodegenerative disease.

“Our father was a servant leader,” the Jackson family said in a statement. “We shared it with the world and, in return, the world became part of our extended family.”

Cheryl Johnson, who runs People for Community Recovery, a Chicago-based environmental justice nonprofit, was about 10 years old when she first saw Jackson in person. It was a field trip to the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the prominent civil rights nonprofit he founded in 1971, headquartered on the South Side. The imposing figure left a lasting impression on him.

“I always remember him saying, ‘Down with hope, down with drugs,'” she said, recalling Jackson’s reserve of charismatic appeal. “Seeing him fight, at that time, for the right to be black in America, was an inspiration to me that I followed for many, many years,” Johnson said.

From television to magazine covers, Johnson grew up with Jackson in the background. His mother, Hazel Johnson, founded People for Community Recovery, one of the nation’s first environmental justice organizations, and worked with Jackson several times during the Clinton administration. Today, she is remembered as “the mother of the environmental justice movement.” Cheryl Johnson never worked directly with Jackson on environmental issues in Chicago, but the two “had discussions on the phone,” she said. “He got it.”

Jackson was often pragmatic, not allowing environmental concerns to trump what he believed black communities needed. In 2021, he successfully urged Illinois lawmakers to propose legislation making it easier to build a natural gas pipeline to rural Pembroke Township, south of Chicago, once considered the largest Black farming community in the northern United States.

“A secure energy source would help jump-start other development – ​​and in turn create jobs and generate hope,” Jackson wrote in an op-ed in support of the plan. As of this year, the pipeline has delivered natural gas to more than 100 residents.

Jackson also took an active interest in the Flint water crisis, showing up several times and providing support. In early 2016, Melissa Mays filed a lawsuit against the city of Flint, Michigan, for exposing nearly 100,000 residents to unsafe water contaminated with lead, a toxic metal linked to developmental delays, cardiovascular problems and infertility.

Mays, a longtime Flint resident and emerging clean water activist, remembers sitting in front of cameras and answering questions about her trial when, unexpectedly, Jackson walked through the doors. “He comes up to us asking if he can say something,” she said.

Shortly afterward, Jackson said authorities should put “duct tape all over the city, because Flint is a crime scene.” Mays said that moment confirmed his concerns and partly launched a long-standing friendship between the two. Jackson returned to Flint several times, helping to make the water crisis a national news story and criticizing the Obama administration for failing to sufficiently respond to the crisis. He made his final public appearance in Flint in 2024 to visit the Flint Southwestern Classical Academy to highlight the importance of voting.

“He wasn’t afraid of anyone,” Mays said.