By the spring of 2001, the Rev. Jesse Jackson was reeling.
In January, the then-59-year-old civil rights activist and former Democratic presidential candidate publicly admitted that he had had an extramarital affair resulting in the birth of a child.
The revelation set off a wave of scrutiny and criticism.
There were calls for him to step down as president and chief executive of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the organization he founded. CNN put his show, “Both Sides with Jesse Jackson,” on hiatus before quietly canceling it.
At the same time, Jackson was dogged by questions about financial dealings, including an amendment of a tax return by one of his charities to add the names of donors it had omitted and to reflect the omitted names of senior staff members, including the woman with whom Jackson admitted fathering a child.
There was, too, a pointed public debate over how a man long held up as a moral and compassionate voice — a two-time presidential candidate courted by the media, big business and politicians who saw his endorsement as crucial to solidifying the Black vote — could retain that authority after admitting infidelity.
Now he needed a soft landing.
Jackson needed Georgia.
So in late April, when he arrived in Augusta at the Gilbert-Lambuth Memorial Chapel on the campus of Paine College, he smiled as he looked out the window of his huge red tour bus and saw a large crowd and a high school band waiting to greet him.
Hand in hand with his wife, Jacqueline, he entered the chapel from the back. Walking down the middle aisle in one of his trademark black safari shirts, a gold Omega Psi Phi pin on his left collar, he slapped palms with everyone he could reach while others leaned in simply to touch the hem of his garment.
When he reached the altar, he screamed: “I am! Somebody!”
The crowd yelled back in unison: “I am! Somebody!”
Credit: Bob Andres
Credit: Bob Andres
The stated goal of the 25-city, seven-day New South Tour for Hope, Healing and Sharing Economic Security through Georgia was to bring attention to voter registration and fiscal equity for the poor.
But the tour also served as a public rite of restoration for Jackson, who had climbed out of the shadow of his mentor, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to build a national political presence, and who now faced searing questions about his personal life and finances.
His self-imposed exile after admitting his affair lasted less than a week before he hit the road looking for what he called “redemption in service.”
“I know we fall down but we get up,” Jackson said at the time. “Those who obtain mercy must be merciful. We must face life challenges with dignity and privacy and move on. I have done that.”
Bypassing major highways for Georgia’s back roads, Jackson stopped in small places like Moultrie, Waycross and Soperton, speaking at churches, community centers, schools and even the state prison in Reidsville.
At every stop, he was greeted by large crowds who did not seem to care about his personal life. Except for reporters, no one asked about his recent controversies.
His wife, steadfastly beside him, received a standing ovation at each stop. Jackson stressed his support for the South and its poor and, in the process, demonstrated his continued popularity as a Black leader.
“That isn’t the intent of this trip,” said Jackson at the time about the controversies swirling around him. “The intent is to make sure we register as many voters as possible. The intent is to speak for the other Georgia, where 60% of the workers make less than $20,000 — where 2 million Georgians have no health insurance.”
Jesse Jackson was synonymous with Chicago, the base from which he ran Operation Breadbasket, established the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and, later, died on Feb. 17, 2026.
But years before and after that Georgia bus tour, the state had already become a central stage for his attempts to shape Southern politics and public policy.
He was woven into Atlanta’s social and cultural life, turning up at King Center dinners, marches, college and high school auditoriums, fundraisers, parties and mayoral campaigns backing candidates from Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young to Kasim Reed.
Jackson’s ties to Atlanta stretch back to the 1960s, when he was a young organizer moving into the orbit of King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
A native of Greenville, South Carolina and a 1964 graduate of North Carolina A&T State University, Jackson joined the King-led Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965.
Credit: Universal History Archive/Univer
Credit: Universal History Archive/Univer
Impressed by his work there, King asked him to take over the Chicago branch of Operation Breadbasket, the SCLC’s economic arm. The program, created in Atlanta, began as a job-placement effort for Black workers.
Under Jackson’s direction, Operation Breadbasket expanded into a vehicle for economic pressure, urging Black consumers to stage large-scale boycotts of white-owned companies until they hired more Black employees and did business with Black-owned firms.
Jackson was in Memphis on April 4, 1968, when King was assassinated.
“Every time I go to Memphis and go to the balcony, it is always like pulling a scab off the sore,” Jackson told the AJC in 2018 on the 50th anniversary of the assassination. “The wound is not healed. Fifty years later.”
By 1971, after clashing with King’s successor, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, Jackson left the SCLC to chart his own course.
In an irony not lost on those close to the movement, Abernathy had urged him to relocate Operation Breadbasket from Chicago to Atlanta — a move Jackson refused.
In 1988, Atlanta became the symbolic bookend to Jackson’s national political rise. That summer, the city hosted the Democratic National Convention at the old Omni Coliseum, where Jackson ended his second bid for the presidency after losing the nomination to Michael Dukakis.
His campaigns in 1984 and 1988 remained, at the time, the strongest performances by a Black candidate in American history.
Credit: AJC file
Credit: AJC file
In his concession speech — regarded by many as one of the finest ever delivered at a Democratic convention — Jackson challenged apartheid in South Africa, defended people living with HIV/AIDS, denounced the illicit drug trade and addiction, and, as always, returned to the plight of the poor and dispossessed.
“We’ve come to Atlanta, the cradle of the Old South, the crucible of the New South,” Jackson said. “Tonight, there is a sense of celebration, because we are moved. Fundamentally moved from racial battlegrounds by law, to economic common ground. Tomorrow we’ll challenge to move to higher ground.”
Years later, seeing Georgia’s political and economic weight, he planted roots in Atlanta, opening a Rainbow/PUSH office.
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
He placed it in the heart of Black Atlanta, at 100 Auburn Ave. in the Atlanta Life Building.
In 1999, he created the Peachtree Street Project to promote equal opportunity in the Southeast and connect minority entrepreneurs to capital.
From that base he convened corporate leaders and civil rights veterans on diversity and pushed companies to open their executive suites and supply chains to Black talent and businesses.
In 2000, on the eve of the Super Bowl at the Georgia Dome, he led demonstrations denouncing the state flag’s Confederate battle emblem and pressed the NFL to join his “One America, One Flag” campaign.
Credit: John Bazemore
Credit: John Bazemore
Before kickoff, he marched outside the Dome with Atlanta leaders Joseph Lowery and Tyrone Brooks, warning that the flag “stands for white supremacy and slavery” and threatening boycotts if lawmakers failed to act.
Atlanta also became the hub for his foreign-policy crusades.
After a trade and investment mission to Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, in 2000, Jackson announced in Atlanta plans to close Africa’s economic and technological gaps in the same way that apartheid was ended.
Credit: AJC File Photo
Credit: AJC File Photo
“The African American community and the Africans were strategic political allies in ending colonialism, occupation and political apartheid,” Jackson said after arriving in Atlanta from South Africa. “We must now be strategic allies to end economic apartheid, health, land and education apartheid.”
In 2003, he used the Auburn Avenue office as a staging ground for emergency relief campaigns for war-torn Liberia, partnering with local groups such as MedShare International and the Liberia Relief Fund to ship medical supplies and food while publicly chiding Washington for doing too little.
That same year, his name was floated as a potential board member for the beleaguered Morris Brown College, which had lost its accreditation and was $27 million in debt.
In 2005, he chose Atlanta’s streets once again, leading the “Keep the Vote Alive” march from the Federal Reserve Bank on Peachtree Street to Morris Brown College to demand renewal of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act — a demonstration that drew civil rights elders, members of Congress and an estimated tens of thousands of marchers filling Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
Later that year and into 2006, he returned repeatedly to condemn Georgia’s voter ID law and to argue, successfully, that it violated the state Constitution.
Even up until 2011, and before his health started to decline, he was still marching and protesting in Atlanta, most notably during the Occupy Atlanta rallies.
Credit: David Goldman
Credit: David Goldman
“Rev. Jackson is my superhero. While other boys my age wanted to be Michael Jordan, I wanted to be Jesse Jackson,” said the Rev. Jamal Bryant, senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church. “His poise, passion and purpose was my blueprint. In 6th grade I wore a Jackson for president button everyday and haven’t turned back since.”
Going back to his 2001 bus tour through the state, Jackson’s final stop was at the E.E. Butler Community Center in Gainesville.
On the bus, he ate a bowl of peach cobbler before walking into the center. As he entered his 25th packed room to repeat the message he had delivered two dozen times already, the crowd rose once more in a standing ovation.
He smiled, stepped to the podium and, as if for the first time, shouted, “I am! Somebody!”
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