00:00Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada
00:30At least seven decades, going all the way back to the late 50s, early 1960s, when he was a protégé
00:38of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
00:42He worked all the way through the 60s and 70s civil rights movements, those bus boycotts, those marches in Salem
00:51and other places,
00:52as he fought for black people in America to have the same rights as their white counterparts.
00:59Remember, this was a time when Jesse Jackson was working in those early days where there was effective segregation in
01:05the southern states of the United States.
01:08Black people weren't able to access schooling. Black people weren't even able to go to the same restaurants as white
01:15people.
01:15Black people had to sit on the back of buses. Reverend Jesse Jackson, along with people like Martin Luther King
01:21and others,
01:22fought for those changes. And the Reverend Jesse Jackson fought for those changes all the way through his career,
01:29passing away peacefully, we are told, at his home in Chicago.
01:36Earlier today, he was 84. He also came to greater national prominence in the 1980s.
01:47He ran twice, unsuccessfully, to be the Democratic nominee for president.
01:53Once in 1984 and then perhaps more memorably, certainly for me anyway, in 1988, where he, for many people, stood
02:05out as a candidate
02:07whose perhaps time had come there would be a black candidate put forward by the Democratic Party for president.
02:15Of course, that did not come to pass. And it was another over 15 years until the Democrats were able
02:23to put a black candidate forward for president.
02:26That man was Barack Obama, who, of course, went on to become president in 2008.
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