The civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson has been hospitalized for a long-term neurodegenerative condition, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition announced.
Jackson was admitted Wednesday evening to Northwestern Memorial Hospital and remains under observation for progressive supranuclear palsy — a rare brain disease that can affect walking, balance, body and eye movements in addition to memory and speech, the organization said in a statement.
“The family appreciates all prayers at this time,” said Rainbow PUSH, created by Jackson in 1996 by way of a merger that combined two nonprofit organizations, Operation PUSH and the National Rainbow Coalition. It has since dedicated itself to advocating for social change and protecting civil rights.
Jackson was initially diagnosed with Parkinson back in 2015 but received an official diagnosis of PSP, also known as Steele-Richardson-Olszewski syndrome, in April 2025. The disease typically begins in a person’s 60s and does have some similarities to Parkinson’s. Most people with PSP develop severe disability within three to five years of diagnosis, according to the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
“Recognition of the effects of this disease on me has been painful, and I have been slow to grasp the gravity of it,” Jackson said in 2017 of his Parkinson’s diagnosis, a disease that, he said, “bested my father.”
A longtime political activist and Baptist minister, who also worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson has suffered a host of health setbacks in recent years, including a gallbladder surgery, a COVID-19 infection that landed him in the hospital and a fall at Howard University that left him with a head injury.
In 2023, he announced his retirement as president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, naming Rev. Frederick Douglass Haynes III as his successor.
Jackson ran for president twice during the 1980s, and in 2000 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
With News Wire Services