CHICAGO, February 17, 2026 – Today, the Chicago Theological Seminary (CTS) community bows its head in reverent sorrow and lifts its heart in immense gratitude as we receive the news that the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.—internationally acclaimed religious leader, civil rights titan, and tireless advocate for human rights—has journeyed to the ancestral realm, passing peacefully in the presence of his beloved family.

Reverend Jackson was a proud son of the South, but it was his 1964 answer to the educational call for further intellectual development at CTS that facilitated Chicago becoming his adopted home. It was no accident that a burgeoning nonviolent revolutionary for justice and peace would choose this institution. Since our founding in 1855, CTS has stood on the vanguard of justice—from our founders’ involvement in the Underground Railroad to our 1957 decision to award Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. his first honorary doctorate from any graduate school.

Reverend Jackson’s life and ministry were the ultimate embodiment of what I call “street-corner religion.” This is a faith that refuses to be quarantined in the holy halls of sanctuaries or the ivory towers of seminaries. It is a religion that dares to move out into the “hood,” where hell and hatred are having a field day. Reverend Jackson understood that the God he served is more likely to show up in the blood-stained streets of ghetto alleys than inside the stained-glass walls of pristine chapels.

In the mid-1960s, CTS became an incubator for Reverend Jackson’s spirit of moral and economic uplift. As he affectionately reminded us, Operation Breadbasket—the economic arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) that fought for fair employment—was for him a kind of “unfinished seminary project” started at CTS. This work laid the foundation for the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, emphasizing a broad and diverse coalition united to save humanity.

Reverend Jackson was a man of extraordinary charisma and vision, but also a man of profound kindness. As Mother Teresa once noted, kindness has converted more people than zeal or eloquence. Beyond the public powerhouse, I knew him as a man of prayer and pastoral care. I vividly remember our first substantive engagement in 2009 at The Riverside Church in New York. Years later, when I became President of CTS, Reverend Jackson visited the seminary simply to talk, to encourage me, to share his wonderful sense of humor, and—most importantly from his vantage point—to pray with me.

We celebrate a leader who was a “righteous troublemaker.” He knew that righteous trouble is the friction produced when you tell the Pharaohs and Caesars of this world that they, too, must give an account of their actions. We invite the world not merely to engage in a “cult of personality,” but to engage carefully with CTS’s Jesse Jackson Oral History Project. Sponsored by the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, this project archives the narratives of Reverend Jackson and his colleagues—ensuring their legacies of courage and creative risk-taking remain a living curriculum for the next generation of activists.

To the Jackson family, we send our deepest love and abiding blessings. Chicago Theological Seminary will continue to honor Reverend Jackson’s ministry by remaining vigilantly committed to the flourishing of the entire planet and the uplift of marginalized people around the globe. We remain especially devoted to those whom the Bible calls “the least of these”—our sacred siblings from diverse backgrounds who are created in the image of God but despised and desecrated by human systems of injustice and cruelty.

Reverend Jackson was equally comfortable in high-stakes meetings at the White House or on Wall Street. Yet, without fail, he lovingly forged solidarity with the “least of these” because of his spiritual convictions. Our mistreated and forgotten siblings were the primary pulse of his ministry. He knew that greatness is not about having one’s name blazoned on the walls of a building or monument. Greatness, in the sight of the Holy One, comes from our willingness—at significant cost to ourselves—to build up the lives of others so that all of us, regardless of identity or background, might be free.

Keeping Hope Alive,

Brad R. Braxton, Ph.D.
President and Professor of Public Theology