The Man Who Kept Hope Alive

A Tribute to the Life and Work of the Reverend Jesse Jackson

A Special Kind of American Audacity

The Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson died this morning in Chicago at age 84, surrounded by his family. And with him goes a particular kind of American audacity — the audacity to believe, against all available evidence, that this country could live up to its own promises.

I want to share with you what he meant to me personally, because I think that’s what this moment calls for.

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Filing the Claim that Mattered

I’m the product of many teachers and mentors. But some of my earliest and most formative models of what leadership looks like came through a television screen. Jesse Jackson was one of them.

Growing up as a young Black man in California and Nevada, I watched Rev. Jackson with something that I can only describe as recognition. Here was a man who sounded like he meant it. He carried himself with a dignity that was not borrowed from anyone else’s permission. A man who worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., witnessed his assassination, and, rather than breaking, channeled that grief into decades of relentless work.

When he ran for president in 1984 — and again in 1988, when he actually won primaries and built a movement — he wasn’t just running a campaign. He was filing a claim on behalf of everyone who had been told that the highest corridors of American power weren’t for them. That claim mattered. It still matters. Jackson’s boldness, sincerity, humanity, and leadership inspired me.

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Credibility Starts at Home

From a national security perspective — and I say this as someone who spent three decades in service to this country in the military, the intelligence community, and the policy world — Jesse Jackson’s work was also deeply patriotic in ways that don’t always get recognized.

His negotiations to free American hostages held in Syria, Cuba, Yugoslavia, and Iraq demonstrated that engagement, moral authority, and relational diplomacy could accomplish what coercive power sometimes could not. He understood that America’s strength abroad is inseparable from its credibility at home — and that credibility, he insisted, had to be earned by how we treated our own people.

That’s not a radical idea. It is an elemental truth foundational to our republic.

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Respect for a True Servant Leader

Jackson’s family said this morning that he was “a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world.”

Servant leadership. It is a phrase that gets thrown around easily but is rarely practiced. I led the Truman National Security Project and the Truman Center for National Policy — national organizations dedicated to producing next-generation leaders our nation needs. That experience was one of the most challenging, rewarding, and transformational missions of my career. But I would never say that it was easy. With that perspective, I have the utmost respect for Jesse Jackson, a pioneering national leader who practiced servant leadership for seven decades, even as his body failed him, even as the political landscape shifted beneath his feet, even as the movements he helped birth moved on without always acknowledging the debt they owed him.

Rev. Jackson kept hope alive. Not as a sentiment — as a discipline.

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Keep hope alive. We owe him nothing less. 🕊️

I think about the work ahead: the fractures in our democracy, the retreat from inclusion that we are witnessing in real time, the urgent need for leaders who will stand in the breach without flinching.

Rev. Jackson would not want us to mourn passively. He would want us to organize. To build coalitions. To run for things. To show up.

So that’s what I’ve done and what I’ll keep doing.

Rest in power, sir. You gave us more than you knew.

Be Intrepid — Tony Johnson
Reconnecting the Republic
February 2026