Jackson was born Jonathan Luther Jackson in Chicago, to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a noted civil rights activist and Baptist minister, and Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson. His godfather was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., from whom Jackson gets his middle name. The middle child of his parents' five children, Jackson's siblings are Santita Jackson and U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., his elders, and Yusef, Jacqueline Jackson, and Ashley, his younger siblings.[2]
Jackson married Marilyn Ann Richards of Brooklyn in 1995. Jonathan and Marilyn Jackson's children include Jonathan T. Jackson, Leah Jackson, and Noah Jackson.[6]
Civil and human rights activism
Jonathan Jackson outside Jon Burge indictmentThe Jacksons visit Gandhi's grave.
Born into a family steeped in human rights activism, Jackson has traveled the world as an aide de camp to his father.[7] He traveled to Syria in 1983, when the Rev. Jackson negotiated with Syrian President Hafez al-Assad to release captured American pilot Navy Lt. Robert Goodman.[8] He met Fidel Castro in 1984, when his father negotiated the release of twenty-two Americans being held in Cuba.[9] He was also with his father in August 2005, when the Rev. Jackson traveled to Venezuela to meet Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.[10] This followed controversial remarks by televangelist Pat Robertson where he implied Chávez should be assassinated. Jackson condemned Robertson's remarks as immoral.[10]
In 2007, Jonathan Jackson took on the issues of innocence and juvenile justice as national spokesman for the RainbowPUSH Coalition.[11] Jackson has highlighted the personal stories and continued trials of those who accused the Chicago Police Department of torturing them to obtain confessions that landed them in prison. They include Darrell Cannon,[12] who faced the death penalty for a 1983 drug-related murder. Cannon was released after accepting a January 2001 deal to abandon his torture claim in exchange for being released, according to the Northwestern Center on Wrongful Convictions. Jackson has also showcased the travails of the Rev. Oscar Walden, who in 1952 became Illinois's first exoneree. Walden was freed after being sentenced to 75 years for a rape he did not commit.[13]
Jackson has championed the cause of Johnnie Lee Savory,[14] a Peoria native who was convicted of stabbing to death his friends, Connie Cooper, 19, and her brother, James Robinson, 14, in their Peoria home in 1977. After serving over 28 years in prison, Savory was released on parole December 19, 2006. Jackson is among several notables who have petitioned the Illinois governor – first Rod Blagojevich, then Pat Quinn — to order DNA testing in the Savory case to prove that not only did Savory not kill his friends, but also to pinpoint the person widely suspected of committing the crime.[15]
In 2008, he turned his attention to closures of Chicago Public Schools.[16] He has led several schools to public hearings and civic education training to thwart school closures and turnarounds by private companies in favor of investing in existing schools and keeping a community's institutional memory intact – especially in highly mobile neighborhoods where large numbers of students are homeless or living on the economic margins.[17] In February 2010, he succeeded in helping Guggenheim Elementary School get off the closure list.[18] Guggenheim is situated in the Englewood community on the city's South Side. Jackson, among others, made the case that forcing students to walk any further to school put them in harm's way. They also made the case that Guggenheim's test scores have steadily improved and it had a close-knit community that possessed the momentum to achieve further gains. Previously, Jackson had persuaded school officials to abandon plans to close Holmes Elementary School, in addition to others.[16]
In 2011, Jackson aided the wrongful conviction crusade of John Walker, an African American man from Buffalo, New York, who, in 1976, when he was just 16 years old, was falsely charged along with four of his closest friends, of having committed a brutal robbery/murder. The victim was an elderly Caucasian man named William Crawford. Walker and his friends were innocent and had verifiable alibis, but they were pursued as suspects nonetheless. In 1977, four of the youths were tried for the crime. Three were convicted, one was acquitted. Walker, Darryl Boyd, and Darryn Gibson were sentenced to 17-to-life, 20-to-life, and 25-to-life, respectively, and they were all sent to adult-population New York State prisons. Walker, after having been incarcerated for a total of 22 years, was released on lifetime parole terms, in 2000. In 2011, a mini-documentary titled "Justice Delayed: The John Walker Story", and concerning Walker's perspective of the episode, was written, directed, and produced by Dr. Peter K.B. St. Jean. Jonathan Jackson, and his father The Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, under the auspices of the elder Jackson's RainbowPUSH organization, made cameo appearances in that short film. In his cameo, the younger Jackson looks directly at the camera, and says "If it could happen to John Walker, it could happen to you"! In Upstate Western New York, Walker and his four childhood friends are referred to as The Buffalo 5. Update: In August 2021, the wrongful 1977 convictions of Buffalo 5 members John Walker and Darryl Boyd were vacated, in a discretionary decision handed down in New York State Supreme Court, in Buffalo. The Honorable Christopher J. Burns presided.
Jackson's view of outsourcing public education mirrors that of an emerging vocal group of educators like New York University's Diane Ravitch[19] and activists who assert that over-reliance on test scores and privatizing of public schools through wholesale charters and outsourcing allows schools to cherry-pick their student bodies while siphoning resources from the most marginalized children. They consider programs like No Child Left Behind and charter schools as a divestment of public education.[20]
Career
Jonathan Jackson, far right, API forum panelist
Jackson started his career in 1988 at Drexel Burnham Lambert as an investment analyst for Michael Milken, an American financier and philanthropist, noted for his role in developing a market for high-yield bonds known as junk bonds. Jackson later worked as an analyst at Independence Bank, was a Shatkin Arbor runner at the Chicago Board of Trade and developed real estate for East Lake Management in Chicago. He rejoined Milken at Knowledge Universe in the late 1990s and currently engages in investments in the wireless, real estate and distribution sectors.[5]
In 1998, Jackson, with his brother Yusef, became owner of a Chicago-based Anheuser-Busch Cos. distributorship – River North Sales and Service, LLC.[21] The deal was met with charges of skepticism and nepotism because Jackson's father had previously organized a boycott of the brewery's products in the early 1980s. The elder Jackson wanted the world's largest brewery to do more business in the African-American community.[22]
In 2009, Jackson lead a group of minority investors in a $250million bid to take over ION Media Networks, the country's largest chain of independent TV stations.[23] Partnered with Cyrus Capital Partners, a New York investment firm, Jackson argued that second-lien lenders are treated as second-class citizens.[24]
Currently, Jackson is a business professor at Chicago State University.
On August 8, 2012, New York Post writer Tara Palmeri reported that an unnamed source close to the Jackson family claimed Jonathan Jackson was being primed to take his brother's place in Congress. In a follow-up to reports about Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. treatment at the Mayo Clinic for depression and gastrointestinal disorders, the Post said the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. was "laying the groundwork" for Jonathan to run in the November election if Jesse Jr. "is not up to running for re-election." The elder Jackson, according to the Post, has denied laying the table for Jonathan. In addition to teaching a full load at Chicago State, Jonathan is a businessman who is currently focused on building his Cricket Wireless franchise operation.[26]
Jonathan Jackson, left in orange, during a cookout at his Cricket Wireless store on 55th St., Chicago
Jesse Louis Jackson Jr. is an American politician. He served as the U.S. representative from Illinois's 2nd congressional district from 1995 until his resignation in 2012. A member of the Democratic Party, he is the son of activist and former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson and, prior to his career in elected office, worked for his father in both the elder Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign and his social justice, civil rights and political activism organization, Operation PUSH. Jackson's wife, Sandi Jackson, served on the Chicago City Council. He served as a national co-chairman of the 2008 Barack Obama presidential campaign. Jackson established a consistent liberal record on both social and fiscal issues, and he has co-authored books on civil rights and personal finance.
George Homer Ryan is a former American politician who was the Republican 39th governor of Illinois from 1999 until 2003. Ryan received national attention for his 1999 moratorium on executions in Illinois and for commuting more than 160 death sentences to life sentences in 2003. He was later convicted of federal corruption charges and spent more than five years in federal prison and seven months of home confinement. He was released from federal prison on July 3, 2013.
Capturing the Friedmans is a 2003 HBO documentary film directed by Andrew Jarecki. It focuses on the 1980s investigation of Arnold and Jesse Friedman for child molestation. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2003. Some of the Friedmans' alleged victims and family members wrote to the Awards Committee protesting the nomination, their identities confirmed, but protected by the judge who presided over the court case.
Melvin Reynolds is an American politician from Illinois. A member of the Democratic Party, he served in the United States House of Representatives from 1993 to 1995. He resigned in October 1995 after a jury convicted him of sexual assault charges related to sex with an underage campaign worker.
Rainbow/PUSH is a Chicago-based nonprofit organization formed as a merger of two nonprofit organizations founded by Jesse Jackson; Operation PUSH and the National Rainbow Coalition. The organizations pursue social justice, civil rights, and political activism.
Richard Ravitch is an American politician and businessman who served as Lieutenant Governor of New York from 2009 to 2010. He was appointed to the position in July 2009 by New York Governor David Paterson. A native of New York City, he graduated from Yale Law School and has worked in his family's real estate development business, a number of government and government-appointed positions, including with the New York State Urban Development Corporation and Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and in private industry, including tenures as chairman of the Bowery Savings Bank and as the chief owner representative in labor negotiations for Major League Baseball.
Anthony Porter was a Chicago resident known for having been exonerated in 1999 of the murder in 1982 of two teenagers on the South Side of the city. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1983, and served 17 years on death row. He was exonerated following introduction of new evidence by Northwestern University professors and students from the Medill School of Journalism as part of their investigation for the school's Innocence Project. Porter's appeals had been repeatedly rejected, including by the US Supreme Court, and he was once 50 hours away from execution.
Roland Wallace Burris is an American politician and attorney who is a former United States Senator from the state of Illinois and a member of the Democratic Party.
Operation Breadbasket was an organization dedicated to improving the economic conditions of black communities across the United States of America.
Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law is the law school of Northwestern University, a private research university. It is located on the university's Chicago campus. Northwestern Law has been ranked among the top 14, or "T14" law schools, since U.S. News & World Report began publishing its annual rankings.
Rob Warden is a Chicago legal affairs journalist and co-founder of three organizations dedicated to exonerating the innocent and reforming criminal justice: the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of California-Irvine, and Injustice Watch, a non-partisan, not-for-profit, journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality. As an investigative journalist in the 1970s, he began focusing on death penalty cases, which led to a career exposing and publicizing the injustices and misconduct in the legal system. Warden's work was instrumental in the blanket commutation of death row cases in Illinois in 2003 and in the abolition of the Illinois death penalty in 2011.
Sandra Lee Jackson is an American politician. She was elected to the Chicago City Council as an alderman of the 7th ward of the City of Chicago in the 2007 municipal elections held on February 27, 2007. She succeeded Darcel A. Beavers who had been appointed by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley after the 2006 November elections to succeed her father William Beavers, Jackson's rival, as alderman of the 7th Ward. Jackson resigned from Chicago City Council, effective January 15, 2013. On February 20, 2013, Jackson pleaded guilty to one count of filing false tax returns, and on August 14, 2013 was sentenced to one year in prison.
Jon Graham Burge was an American police detective and commander in the Chicago Police Department who was found guilty of having "directly participated in or implicitly approved the torture" of at least 118 people in police custody in order to force false confessions.
Jesse Louis Jackson is an American political activist, Baptist minister, and politician. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as a shadow U.S. senator for the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1997.
The congressional election in Illinois's 2nd congressional district on December 12, 1995, resulted in the entry to Congress of Jesse Jackson Jr. as a Democratic Party representative, a position he held until 2012.
Santita Jackson is an American singer and political commentator from Chicago, Illinois. As a singer, Jackson toured with Roberta Flack and performed the National Anthem at President Bill Clinton's second inauguration. She has appeared on the Fox News Channel and is the host of a television show on The Word Network. Santita attended high school with Michelle Obama and served as Obama's maid of honor at her 1992 wedding to Barack Obama.
An election took place on February 24, 2015, to elect the mayor of Chicago. The election was non-partisan and no candidate received a majority. A runoff election was held between the top two finishers on April 7, 2015, and resulted in the reelection of incumbent mayor Rahm Emanuel. The elections were concurrent with the 2015 Chicago aldermanic elections.
Corruption in Illinois has been a problem from the earliest history of the state. Electoral fraud in Illinois pre-dates the territory's admission to the Union in 1818. Illinois had the third most federal criminal convictions for public corruption between 1976 and 2012, behind New York and California.
Jacqueline Lavinia "Jackie" Jackson is an American author and peace activist. She wrote Loving You, Thinking of You, Don't Forget to Pray, a compilation of letters she had sent to her son Jesse Jackson Jr. while the latter was incarcerated. Married to The Reverend Jesse Jackson since 1962, she has been described by The Los Angeles Times as "elusive, private and largely unknown to the public."
↑ "Parents Concerned By Dangerous Walk To New School" February 10, 2010, 10:34pm. Central, CBS Channel 2, "Archived copy". Archived from the original on February 23, 2010. Retrieved April 10, 2010.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
↑ Staff reports, Johnson Publishing Co., "Yusef Jackson's Ownership Group Purchases Anheuser-Busch Chicago Distributorship". Jet magazine 14 December 1998
↑ Flahery, Peter (March 18, 2001). "Jesse came to do good and did well". The Baltimore Sun.
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