On the night of November 4, 2008, in Chicago’s Grant Park, Mr Barack Obama stood onstage before a massive, emotional crowd and delivered a victory speech as the first black president of the United States.

Among that crowd was American civil rights leader Rev Jesse Jackson, who wept openly. His tears represented the historic nature of Mr Obama’s victory — a moment that owed much to Mr Jackson’s insistence, beginning in the 1980s, that American politics must include black aspirations as a central rather than peripheral concern.

It is against that background that we acknowledge that Rev Jackson’s death on Monday closes a chapter in modern history that stretched from the segregated American South to the inauguration of the first black president. Few public figures lived long enough to stand at so many turning points — fewer still helped create them.

Rev Jackson was not merely present at the civil rights movement; he was formed by it. As a young organiser in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference alongside Dr Martin Luther King Jr, he marched, mobilised, and spoke in the language of moral urgency. He was in Memphis in 1968 when Dr King was assassinated.

His presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 did not win him the Democratic party nomination to contest for the White House, but they changed who could realistically seek it. By placing poverty, voting rights, and racial equality at the centre of a major party platform, Rev Jackson widened American democracy.

His appeal went beyond race; it was an economic and moral argument as he spoke for what he called “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised”. That coalition later became the electoral path that made Mr Obama viable.

Yet Rev Jackson’s work stretched beyond the ballot box. Through Operation PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition he fused civil rights with economic justice, insisting that equality without opportunity was an illusion. Internationally, he acted as mediator and envoy, negotiating the release of prisoners and campaigning against apartheid.

Like many consequential figures, his life was not untouched by controversy. A hurtful remark in 1984, and the later legal troubles of his son, complicated his public standing. But history ultimately measures leaders by the structures they change, and Rev Jackson, without doubt, altered political possibility.

The question now is how to preserve a legacy that risks fading into simplified memory. Statues and commemorative days alone will not suffice. Rev Jackson’s impact was institutional and civic, and so must be the preservation.

His speeches, organising manuals, and campaign strategies, we suggest, should be digitised and integrated into school curricula across the Americas and the Caribbean, not as optional civil rights history, but as democratic instruction. Young people should study how grass roots mobilisation reshapes national policy.

We also believe that universities and civil society organisations should establish mediation and conflict-resolution fellowships in his name, reflecting his role as negotiator in international crises.

Rev Jackson belonged to a generation that believed citizenship required participation, not observation. His life reminds us that progress is neither inevitable nor permanent; it is organised. Preserving his legacy therefore means continuing the unfinished work of expanding who counts, and who gets heard.