In Losing Jesse Jackson, We Lost a Champion of Justice

Georgia Garvey
Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:00:00 -0800
Opinion

It seems like everyone in Chicago has a story about the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who died this week at the age of 84. Here's mine.

I was a young reporter when I first talked to him, working the weekend and holiday shifts, which meant I often covered some of the bleakest stories in the newspaper. This story was among the bleakest.

I had been awoken early that Christmas morning by the sound of the phone ringing. My husband answered groggily, mumbling an "I know who you are," before handing me the phone and going back to sleep.
Updated: Sat Feb 21, 2026

It seems like everyone in Chicago has a story about the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who died this week at the age of 84. Here's mine.

I was a young reporter when I first talked to him, working the weekend and holiday shifts, which meant I often covered some of the bleakest stories in the newspaper. This story was among the bleakest.

I had been awoken early that Christmas morning by the sound of the phone ringing. My husband answered groggily, mumbling an "I know who you are," before handing me the phone and going back to sleep.

It was my editor at the newspaper calling to tell me about my assignment that day. A 79-year-old man had been shot and killed during a robbery the night before. I was to go to his widow's house and talk to her.

I got dressed and drove to the woman's apartment in Hyde Park and waited outside in the cold for our photographer. I could procrastinate until he got there, but eventually I'd have to stand in the chrome and glass entryway, hoping no one would answer, and ring the doorbell.

It was impossible to feel like anything less than a ghoul in those moments, a buzzard circling the remnants of someone's tragedy.

To my dismay, someone buzzed us up.

When we entered, I was surprised to find the rooms of the apartment full. People were wiping down counters, tidying up, answering phone calls. One woman showed me to the living room, where the widow sat, staring at her Christmas tree.

Dolores Elliott was an elegant woman, with the kind of curly, French-style bob I'd always wanted but never could achieve. Sitting beside her was a plate holding a slice of coffee cake, untouched.

Dolores saw me and motioned me over, wanting me to sit beside her while she told me about her husband, Ralph. She called him a "gentle giant" and showed me a picture. The kindness glowed from him like an aura. She talked about their annual Christmas party, about how he had volunteered to go pick up the chicken for it.

Just outside of the restaurant, at 4 p.m., Ralph had been robbed — shot in the face without preamble. The murderer then held Ralph up as he rifled through the elderly man's pockets.

The killer had been caught a few blocks away, pointed out to police by shocked bystanders. He had just gotten out of prison, on parole for a different murder, and was wanted on an arrest warrant for not complying with the terms of his release.

But Dolores didn't know that yet.

She was religious, though, and explained that her faith told her to forgive and leave revenge to God. She told me then about her involvement with the Rainbow-Push Coalition, how she and her husband had, for more than 40 years, volunteered and worked on civil rights causes. The Rev. Jesse Jackson was a family friend.

When I got back to the newspaper's offices, I saw that Jackson's phone number was listed in the file that held phone numbers of famous Chicagoans and frequent sources. He was both.

There's a dance that reporters do in interviews, particularly with folks who are used to talking to the press. You give them the question they expect, you get the answer you expect and that goes on for a while. Jackson had done innumerable interviews, and I anticipated the dance would go as usual.

He started by talking about Ralph and Dolores' volunteering over the years, the kind of solid work that's done by those who don't show up in newspaper stories but prop up the ones who do. Jackson patiently answered all my questions, even the silly ones. I was nervous to talk to someone like him, someone who had done things, who had spoken, many times, to better and smarter reporters than me.

At the end, I tossed up what I thought was a softball for a preacher.

Dolores had said she'd forgiven her husband's killer. Did he? I expected something trite in return, something polite and soft. But Jesse Jackson did not deliver.

Forgiveness was a spiritual act, he told me. Justice was a social responsibility.

Dolores could forgive if she desired and was able to, but that did not take away her right to justice. That was something we all owed her and any other victim of crime. We should not fail the vulnerable in God's name.

I think about Ralph a lot — and by extension, Jackson — and the pointlessness of that good man's death. Though his killer was sentenced to life in prison, dying in his early 60s, justice never seemed served. He shouldn't have been on the street at all. Perhaps he had even wanted to return to an institution's cold embrace.

In his eulogy of Ralph, Jackson talked about that justice denied, about society's failure to protect him from violence. He knew, intimately, about violence, having watched as another man was shot in the face and killed 40 years earlier on a balcony in Memphis.

When I heard of Jackson's death, I thought of Ralph Elliott and of justice. I thought about how we might wait for it for years, for decades, for our entire lives. And though justice may never come, I also think about how there are those among us who will not and cannot ever stop fighting for it. They fight to their last breath.

Jackson, I know, was one of those men.

What a loss that is.