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.
A heavyweight with few equals today, Jackson commanded the respect of business leaders and used his influence to champion both the dignity of everyday workers and sweeping reforms across industries. From small enterprises to Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs, he broadened economic opportunity for minorities and women nationwide.
Operation Breadbasket
In the 1960s, the SCLC launched Operation Breadbasket, a campaign to desegregate jobs and increase employment opportunities for Black Americans.
Jackson and his team advocated for local grocery chains in majority Black neighborhoods in Chicago to hire more Black employees and partner with Black-owned business contractors and banks. Jackson met directly with business owners and inked deals with companies under threat of a boycott or strike.
High-Low grocery stores, a white-owned chain, agreed to hire Black Americans for 184 new jobs and opened accounts at two Black-owned banks. By July 1967 Breadbasket had secured 2,200 jobs worth more than $15 million in annual income.
The movement’s success pushed Jackson into the spotlight as one of Chicago’s most influential civil rights leaders and established a strategy of combining public action with face-to-face meetings with business leaders, which he employed throughout his career.
From Chicago to Wall Street
Breadbasket was the first of many Jackson-led campaigns to not just increase employee diversity but ensure long-term investment in Black businesses and entrepreneurs.
In the 1990s, Jackson took the strategy to Wall Street, advancing racial diversity in both symbolic and material ways. He successfully advocated for the New York Stock Exchange to close on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1997, persuading then–head of the Big Board Richard Grasso and former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan to support the move.
Citigroup co-chairman Sanford Weill and Grasso backed Jackson as he raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wall Street firms to support the campaign to improve hiring and retention practices and allocate more capital to minority-owned companies, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Ahead of Goldman Sachs’ 1999 IPO, Jackson pushed the financial services firm to include more minority-owned firms as underwriters. While Goldman initially decided not to include any Black underwriters, in the end, they included 17 minority-owned and three women-owned underwriters, according to Bloomberg.
Jackson sustained his relationship with the firm for years, attending shareholder meetings and continuing to pressure the company to level the playing field between Wall Street and everyday Americans. In 2022, Goldman launched its One Million Black Women initiative, investing $10 billion in direct capital and $100 million in philanthropic support to narrow the opportunity gap for Black women.
Pushing for transparency in Silicon Valley
In 2014 Jackson turned his sights to Silicon Valley, which he called “the heart of capital growth.” He embarked on a monthslong campaign in the Bay Area, urging the tech industry to be more transparent about its workforce diversity and commit to improving it.
Jackson was right about the industry’s growth—between 2007 and 2024, tech software and services jobs grew by 75%, more than four times the rate of all U.S. jobs, according to an analysis by CBRE. He saw the same potential to desegregate jobs in Silicon Valley as he did working with SCLC in the South, he told Fortune in 2014.
Jackson employed the same strategy as Breadbasket, never quitting the strategy of action alongside conversation. Jackson met privately with Apple CEO Tim Cook and said he was impressed by Cook and how he understood “the value of inclusiveness.” Three days later, he led a protest outside Apple headquarters in Cupertino during a rainstorm.
“Too many young Blacks and browns who master the sciences can’t raise money at startup incubators. They can’t get access to capital,” Jackson told Fortune. “There was a time when we didn’t have Black or Asian baseball players—they didn’t recruit them. To change that, we had to scout them, and create training camps. We have a better game of baseball because of that. We need to do the same with tech.”
Jackson persuaded reluctant companies to publicly reveal their diversity statistics, which they previously only reported to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Unsurprisingly, that summer, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Facebook revealed their gender and racial diversity, showing the companies as overwhelmingly white or Asian and male. Companies continued to publicly share their demographics for years after Jackson’s first push, and Jackson followed up with varying success, asking for more data on board and C-suite diversity, gender and race breakdowns of suppliers and contractors, and employee retention.
“The most important thing is to want to create inclusion and diversity to invent new verticals and horizontals for employees to join,” he said. “The lack of diversity isn’t because people don’t have the genetics, it’s because of old social patterns that don’t let new people in.”
After decades of progress, companies backtrack on DEI
In his lifetime, Jackson saw the U.S. open up to diversity efforts, and then retract on progress to which he’d dedicated his career.
Since President Donald Trump took office in 2025, dozens of companies have rolled back the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies they implemented following the murder of George Floyd and the nationwide racial reckoning that ensued. Use of the term “DEI” declined 68% from 2024 to 2025 in the major filings of S&P 500 companies.
Goldman Sachs, which once collaborated with Jackson to improve its workplace and investment diversity, recently removed race, gender, and sexual orientation diversity factors from its board criteria, WSJ reported.
Despite declining health owing to Parkinson’s disease, Jackson joined a nationwide boycott against Target after the company announced last year that it would end the DEI goals it had set to increase Black employees’ representation and advancement and promote Black-owned businesses.
When asked by Fortune in 2014 about when he expected to see change in Silicon Valley, Jackson said: “There are people with their shovels ready who are ready to invest and reform. A lot has changed over the years. You can vote bilingually and look at our president. Once the system opens up, we’ll see more changes. The numbers have always been there. Sometimes people have tunnel vision so they can’t see the whole marketplace.”
Even as terms like “equity” and “inclusion” have fallen out of fashion, Jackson’s decades-long advocacy fundamentally changed how businesses approach workplace diversity and created opportunities for many minorities across the U.S.
