Civil rights activist the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who died at 84 on Tuesday, may be best known as a political organizing powerhouse, but he began his career by increasing workplace diversity in the business world.
In 1966 Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) handpicked a 24-year-old Jackson to lead a campaign to increase economic opportunity for Black Americans in Chicago. The cause remained a strong through line in his six-decade-long career.
