He used to steal my lemon poppy seed muffin.
Not the whole thing. Just a chunk—big enough to ruin it, small enough to make you laugh instead of fuss. He’d walk into the station at WGCI in Chicago, already mid-sentence about something the rest of us needed to understand, and somewhere between the lesson and the call to action, he’d reach over and break off a piece like it was his God-given right.
Maybe it was.
I knew who Jesse Jackson was long before I knew the man. You couldn’t grow up Black in America and not know. But when I met him, what struck me wasn’t the icon. It was the quirky humor. The way he could be familiar with anyone in his company, make you feel like the conversation had been going on long before you arrived. He was relatable. But make no mistake—he was fierce.
Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. died peacefully Tuesday morning in Chicago, surrounded by his family. He was 84. The world will remember him as a civil rights titan, a two-time presidential candidate, a Baptist minister, and the founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. But I want to talk about something that matters deeply to the work we do here at the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. I want to talk about what Jesse Jackson understood about Earth.
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Jackson was ordained in 1968, the same year a bullet stole Martin Luther King Jr. from the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. He was there that day. He carried King’s vision forward as a living mandate—one that refused to separate racial justice from economic justice, and understood both were inseparable from environmental justice.
In 1991, when the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit convened in Washington, D.C., Jackson was among the leaders present. That summit redefined the very meaning of “environment”—no longer pristine wilderness and remote national parks, but where people live, work, study, play, and pray. The air in the housing project. The water in the schoolyard. The soil beneath the church.
Jackson understood this instinctively. His faith had always told him so. And honestly, I think a lot of us who grew up in communities where the church was the center of everything understood it too—we just didn’t have the institutional language for it yet. We called it “taking care of your people.” Jackson was one of the ones who gave that knowledge a microphone.
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He was born Jesse Louis Burns in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941. Raised under Jim Crow. Taunted for his out-of-wedlock birth. Taught to use the back of the bus. He later said these experiences motivated him to succeed—but I think they did something more. They taught him to see systems. To understand that the forces pressing down on Black communities weren’t random; they were designed.
When Jackson spoke about toxins being routed into communities of color, he wasn’t adopting a new cause. The pollution was the segregation by another name. The contaminated water was the back of the bus, just harder to see because nobody put up a sign that said “Colored.” The sacrifice zones—and I hate that phrase, because nothing about those communities was voluntary—were the same neighborhoods that had been written off for decades.
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His Rainbow Coalition was itself an ecological idea, though I doubt anyone called it that at the time. An understanding that a system thrives only when all of its parts are recognized, nourished, and in relationship with one another. “Our flag is red, white and blue,” he once said, “but our nation is a rainbow—red, yellow, brown, Black and white—and we’re all precious in God’s sight.”
I’ve turned that line over in my head more times than I can count. Because what he was really saying was that diversity isn’t decoration. It’s structural. He didn’t need a journal article to arrive at it.
In Richmond, California, he used his influence to bring Chevron to the bargaining table with communities fighting refinery pollution. He showed up because the families choking on fumes were the same families his entire ministry had been built to serve. The environment was never an abstraction for him. It was somebody’s grandmother’s garden that no longer grew, and the grandmother who could tell you exactly when the growing stopped and what moved in down the road that year.
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At the Yale Forum, we increasingly ask a hard question—the one that keeps me up: whose spiritual wisdom has been left out of the ecological conversation entirely?
Jackson’s legacy forces that question into the open. He was not an environmentalist in the way the mainstream movement has defined the term. I don’t think he would have had any patience for that framing, frankly. But he understood—as the Black church has always understood—that creation care and justice are the same breath. You don’t get to love Earth and then look the other way when its people are choking.
That’s not a footnote in the story of ecology. If we’re honest about it, that’s closer to the whole story than the version most of us were taught. Jackson lived it with a fierce, stubborn, muffin-stealing grace that made it impossible to look away.
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He marched with King. He ran for president twice and changed the Democratic Party forever. He negotiated the release of hostages in Syria, Cuba, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He lived with Parkinson’s disease for nearly a decade and progressive supranuclear palsy for years after that, and still he kept showing up. I don’t know how to explain that kind of stubbornness except to say it looked a lot like faith.
Keep hope alive, he told us. Over and over. Until it stopped being a slogan and became something closer to a prayer.
I felt it at WGCI, watching him steal my muffin and keep right on preaching. I feel it now, writing this. The man never let you separate things—race from economics, economics from environment, environment from faith. He wouldn’t let you off that easy. And that refusal, that holy stubbornness, is what carries us forward.
Rest well, Reverend. We’ll keep it alive.
Nikki Woods | Marketing Lead, Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology | Communications Director, The Gaian Way | National Media Personality and Founder of The Reinvention Method and Maroon House Press.