Arab slave trade of Africans in conspiracy with Europe--old news

Starved, 'mutilated' and blackmailed migrants auctioned off as slaves by smugglers in Libya ⋆ Democratic World Federalists

Slave markets are springing up across Libya trading impoverished African migrants who have arrived on the Mediterranean coast dreaming of a new life in Europe. A new investigation has revealed people are being sold as modern-day slaves for as little as £300 ($400).

According to CNN which exposed the racket, slave sales are conducted on the outskirts of the nation’s capital, Tripoli, where auctions take place for various types of manual labourers. In one case, a video was made available, which shows the sale of “big strong boys for farm work”.

An undercover operation revealed similar auctions where around a dozen people were sold in a matter of five to six minutes. “Does anybody need a digger? This is a digger, a big, strong man, he’ll dig,” an auctioneer calls out in one clip. “What am I bid, what am I bid?”

The interested bidders raise their hands till a final price is decided on following which the new slaves are transferred in the possession of their new “masters”.

Slavery is getting a boost in places like Libya that are seeing a wave of desperate migrants from North Africa, hoping to find a better life in Europe. A crackdown by local authorities on boats ferrying people to the coast of Italy has turned smugglers to another profession — that of flesh traders.

At a detention centre in Tripoli, one man recalled how he ended up becoming an indentured servant after he ran out of money. Victory, 21, left Nigeria with his life savings and hopes of a brighter future. On reaching Libya he was forced to live in inhuman conditions and later sold as a day labourer once he could not afford to pay his smugglers.

He expected to pay off his debt through work but was unable to make enough. Finally his smugglers contacted his family for ransom. He was released after paying them a total of more than $2,780.

Illegal migrants from Africa are taken to a detention centre after being picked up by the Libyan Coast Guard on 8 July, 2017. Mahmud Turkia/AFP

“If you look at most of the people here, if you check your bodies, you see the marks. They are beaten, mutilated,” he said of his fellow detainees who have reportedly suffered a similar fate.

On being made aware of the slave trade in the region, the authorities said they were not aware of the auctions but confirmed the presence of organised gangs operating smuggling rings.

Earlier this year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) expressed interest in investigating crimes against immigrants in Libya, after the International Organization for Migration (IOM)warned about people being sold at slave markets in the country.

The original source of this article is International Business Times

Goodbye and Good Riddance, Robert Mugabe

DEC

2

Robert Mugabe was no socialist. He was a man obsessed with his own power and control.

Goodbye and Good Riddance, Robert Mugabe

Robert Mugabe was no socialist. He was a man obsessed with his own power and control.

Robert Mugabe admires a Maori carving the New Zealand government gifted to the newly formed nation in 1980. Archives New Zealand / Flickr

By Melusi Nkomo

When the history of Robert Mugabe is written, it will not be about a black man raised by a single mother, who defied all odds in racially segregated Southern Rhodesia to pursue an education at the highest levels. Neither will it be about an articulate black African teacher-turned-politician, who spent around a decade in prison for challenging white colonial racism and working for the betterment of black Zimbabweans. It will be about the four decades Mugabe was at the helm in post-colonial Zimbabwe, in which his rule was anything but admirable.

 As a young politician in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mugabe was by no means the most prominent of the black nationalists fighting white colonial rule. Neither was he the most motivated. He was, however, the most eloquent. For a clique of educated black elites, whose political and societal outlook was fashioned in mission schools, Mugabe was the man of choice to convey the message to white rulers — in voice and comportment — that blacks were no longer “uncivilized tribesmen.” They were sophisticated enough to deserve the franchise.
 In everyday manners and air, Mugabe was an “English man” who spoke their language in the shapely tone of an eloquent and “cultured” gentleman. It is no wonder that when he arrived on the nascent nationalist scene, fellow nationalists noticed his gift of gab and appointed him publicity secretary in their organization, the National Democratic Party.

 At the time, Mugabe had come back home, presumably for the holidays, from Ghana, where he worked as a teacher, with the intention to go back to West Africa.

He may never have wanted to stay in Rhodesia for long. He became the reluctant latecomer who would go on to dominate Zimbabwean politics for almost half a century.

Much of what people outside Zimbabwe know about Mugabe starts on April 18, 1980, when the colonial tether on Zimbabwe snapped and the country gained independence from Britain. The popular story is that Mugabe, as a Marxist revolutionary, ushered in a new era of liberation and social progress, exemplified by the early expansion of the education and health delivery system for black people. Yet Mugabe was neither a socialist nor a revolutionary.

 He was a rebel, but one who wanted to replace white rulers with a self-interested political project. When he “talked revolution,” it was out of expediency, to further his goal of securing the presidency for life. When he donned revolutionary garb, it was always fleetingly (in the early 1980s, for picture poses), and with an unseemly addition: a tie that clashed with his safari suit.

 Mugabe never hid his disdain for pot-smoking and dreadlocked black men, instead marveling at European classical musicians, especially Beethoven. In an oft-recounted story, Mugabe was quick to express his displeasure about Bob Marley’s invitation to perform at the 1980 independence celebrations. It’s said that he wanted a pianist, preferably British, possibly Cliff Richard.

 As an intellectual, Mugabe was never a serious one. His idea of intellectualism was confined to the accumulation of certificates, academic or otherwise. His much-vaunted “seven university degrees,” many achieved through correspondence, were a testimony to this shallowness. A cursory Google search of his works pulls up one collection of his speeches titled Our War of Liberation: Speeches, Articles, Interviews, 1976-1979, but nothing intellectually intriguing. His politics correspondingly lacked ideological robustness, and many of his party and national programs were not designed to outlive him. For that reason, he loathed any discussion about succession, and was violent to anyone posing any kind of threat to him.

 It is easy to point to the social programs during the independence euphoria of the 1980s as an example of Mugabe’s commitment to black people and socialism. But throughout the 1980s, and with “Britain’s willful blindness,” Mugabe sought to build a one-party dictatorship in the mold of the Kims’ North Korea. In fact, he invited North Korean military supervisors to help him create a private army brigade that hounded the opposition and committed one of the worst atrocities against African people in independent Africa. In the end, the Gukurahundi massacres left an estimated twenty thousand civilians, most of them isiNdebele-speaking black men, women, and children, dead in unmarked mass graves.

 Mugabe’s politics were a bizarre populism that relied on force rather than the support of the masses. While this aided his self-interested political ambitions, it was simply unsustainable; his hold began faltering as early as the 1990s. Faced with a fast-changing global political economy and louder demands for change at home, Mugabe’s ostensible socialism was exposed as the clumsy fraud that it was.

 Western donors who had footed part of his bills started isolating him, and corruption in his government sprouted. The perceived glories of the 1980s went down the drain and, with them, the social programs. Epidemic after epidemic exposed the weak foundations of the health care delivery system, from HIV and AIDS in the late 1990s to cholera and typhoid in the 2000s. Educated Zimbabweans hopped in desperation from one country to another, carrying wads of certificates that often yielded little more than menial jobs.

 The Mugabe-era education system, specifically, was bad for the country. With it, he stifled critical minds and killed innovation. Schools taught people to cram for exams and follow instructions to a tee. The most famous teacher in the village or township was the one who whacked the hell out of children for failing a test. Most school were a mirror image of Mugabe’s political modus operandi; slapping down dissenters and ruling the country with a huge stick in hand. Pupils passed with high grades, but out of fear: fear of the teachers’ reprisals or, in the case of college students, fear of being left behind when others’ ostensible qualifications allowed them to leave the country after graduation.

 Mugabe, a teacher trained in the 1940s and 1950s, when blacks weren’t expected or allowed to think critically, managed to oil and expand what his Rhodesian predecessors had left behind. He flaunted the education system whenever he got the chance. It churned out a politically compliant population that loved instruction manuals and textbooks. Individuals who recited what they memorized under the watch of an angry teacher — and ended up doing it with glee. That was sometimes seen as a sign of intelligence amongst Zimbabweans.

 Those who managed to skip the border to escape the hellhole that our country had become made for lovely, smiling, articulate butlers and waiters that attended to tourists in places like Dubai and Cape Town. Zimbabweans could, of course, read and cram the menu, enough to explain food recipes to visitors in impeccable English.

 They also made for the best implementers of NGO projects — whether or not they believed in their employers’ philosophies (most of the times they didn’t). They became the best foremen and machine operators on farms in South Africa’s Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces — because they could read and follow instructions on seed and pesticide packages. Most never uttered any criticism, come rain come sunshine.

Sadly, that extended to the politics of our nation. And Robert Mugabe knew it.

Revolution Against Fear

Revolution Against Fear

 

"The only thing to fear is fear itself."--President Roosevelt

No human progress is possible while people are paralyzed by fear. Fear is the great monster of the mind that prevents people from standing against oppression. Once the great monster fear is cut off, we see people can stand tall in the face of any challenge, whether from the guns of state terror, the tanks, police, jails, prisons and ultimately death. Overcoming the fear of death is the ultimate challenge of man. Once a man or woman accepts that his/her life and death are all for God, transcending the self, fear is discarded into the dustbin of history.

We see this occurring in North Africa and the Middle East at this hour. The people have cast off the illusion of fear and are standing tall against oppression from regimes long supported by American Imperialism. America has been the major arms supplier, the guns, bullets, poison gas, equipment for torture chambers and dungeons that were established to allow the most wicked and repressive regimes to flourish for the last forty years.

Let us be clear that America has a history of oppressing its own citizens, of filling their bodies and minds with fear, of reducing them from Kunta Kinte to Toby en mass. We have yet to learn the true story of resistance to the American slave system by North American Africans, who mastered fear during three centuries of chattel enslavement, not recognized as humans or citizens. And yet from within the slave system, North American African resisted by any means necessary, ultimately taking up arms in the Civil War, only to be betrayed by those who won the war and those who were defeated, especially when the 200,000 African soldiers were disarmed.

It is this disarming that allowed fear to return in the from of state terror in the guise of the KKK, the lynchings, virtual slave labor and disenfranchisement during the short lived Reconstruction.

Imagine, for a time the people who were banned from learning to read and write, upon emancipation exercised a thirst for learning so great the children had to be beaten out of the classroom and made to go home. Today we have flipped the script, the children must be beaten or taken to juvenile hall for refusing to attend school. School districts have gone broke because their daily attendance was so low they could not qualify to fund their budgets.

How did the fear of knowledge become pervasive? How did it become a hip fad to be ignut? We need only examine the lives of men who read books and not only transformed their lives but the lives of their people, e.g., Fredrick Douglass, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver. These men cast aside their fears, stood up and made their people stand. Imagine the eternal words of Harriet Tubman, "I could have freed more slaves if they had known they were slaves."

We see here the need for the slave system, today the neo-slave system, to keep people in ignorance and fear. The slave system rules through ignorance and fear. The Civil Rights movement was on the road to success once the people in the South cast off their fears, especially the fear of death, the fear of jail, prison and retaliation.

The 2.4 million people in US jails and prisons are special examples of the fearless. Most people who commit crimes are somewhat fearless, otherwise they would not take penitentiary chances, as they say. Those addicted to fear may be those who decide to hold down a job, to never consider economic independence, until of late when it is crystal clear the job for life is a myth.

We see a college education is no guarantee of a job. Our children will thus need to cast away their fears to configure a fair market system of economic justice. Free market capitalism is exhausted, surely America and her gang of global bandits are in their last days before being rounded up and divested of their ill gotten gains.

By what right should 400 people possess the wealth equal to 150 million? There must be a redistribution of the wealth stolen from the deaf, dumb and blind, yes, those robbed and left half dead on the roadside, those who are victims of American capital accumulation since the beginning of the slave system, i.e., the founding of this nation.

And yet the greatest robbery is not what occurred yesterday, but the robbery of the present global finance bandits who have ripped off the people with their pyramid schemes and sub prime loan scams that stole trillions from people and nations, since the blood suckers of the poor care nothing about people or nations.

The jobless and homeless of today will not rise from this condition until they cast away all fears and seize the means of production and the housing they need. Every human being needs a job and a dwelling. There is no mystery about the human right to a job and a place to stay.

Every human being should have a home with a life estate. This is the true and final solution to homelessness. The home with a life estate cannot be sold or transferred, thus a person will become free of the anxiety of homelessness. And then we consider the reality that all persons need a way to earn money to survive and thrive.

A society that cannot provide its people with economic security shall have no national security, for it is a failed society, a society in chaos, such as we see in America today. There are almost three million people in prison, mostly due to economic crimes, crimes of necessity.

And yet many of these criminals are fearless, some have the very creative minds we need to address the issues of society. And yet they are locked down, many for the most trivial offences, 80% were drug addicted at the time of their arrests and perhaps 50% have severe mental health issues, so what we have in American prisons and jails are drug addicts and the mentally ill or the dual diagnosed.

Still, we have seen that some of our greatest minds came from prison, recall Malcolm, George Jackson, Eldridge, Tookie. Even today we have millions of fearless minds locked down, e.g. Ruchell McGee, and so many other men and women, not to mention our greatest mind on death row, Mumia Abu Jamal. If a man can be productive as Mumia has been on death row, what excuse do we have out here on the big yard?

As Amiri Baraka asked, "Is it difficult for you?" And so I ask, is it difficult for you out here on the big yard? I especially ask the people of the Bay Area who have the legacy of the Black Panther Party who taught one essential lesson which was to discard our fears and stand tall in the face of oppression, is it difficult for you? I say smash your fear of the police, politicians, blood sucking merchants who refuse to hire you yet you do not protest. Challenge the oil and gasoline bandits who reap quarterly profits in the billions by manipulating the markets. But no, you won't dare confront Shell, Mobil, Exxon, Chevron, but you want to kill a brother who jumps ahead of you in the line at the gas station.

It is time to be informed and fearless. Use your cell phone to be informed, Google words you don't understand rather than spend the entire day asking your mate, "Where you at?" Ask yourself where your mind is at, where is your heart and soul at? Where is the fearlessness of your ancestors at?

--Marvin X

5/5/11

Women Who Sexually Assault Men--Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, Comments by Dr. Nathan Hare and Marvin X

Genesis 39New International Version (NIV)

Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife

39 Now Joseph had been taken down to Egypt. Potiphar, an Egyptian who was one of Pharaoh’s officials, the captain of the guard, bought him from the Ishmaelites who had taken him there.

2 The Lord was with Joseph so that he prospered, and he lived in the house of his Egyptian master. 3 When his master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord gave him success in everything he did,4 Joseph found favor in his eyes and became his attendant. Potiphar put him in charge of his household, and he entrusted to his care everything he owned. 5 From the time he put him in charge of his household and of all that he owned, the Lord blessed the household of the Egyptian because of Joseph. The blessing of the Lord was on everything Potiphar had, both in the house and in the field. 6 So Potiphar left everything he had in Joseph’s care; with Joseph in charge, he did not concern himself with anything except the food he ate.

Now Joseph was well-built and handsome, 7 and after a while his master’s wife took notice of Joseph and said, “Come to bed with me!”

8 But he refused. “With me in charge,” he told her, “my master does not concern himself with anything in the house; everything he owns he has entrusted to my care. 9 No one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?”10 And though she spoke to Joseph day after day, he refused to go to bed with her or even be with her.

11 One day he went into the house to attend to his duties, and none of the household servants was inside. 12 She caught him by his cloak and said, “Come to bed with me!” But he left his cloak in her hand and ran out of the house.

13 When she saw that he had left his cloak in her hand and had run out of the house, 14 she called her household servants. “Look,” she said to them, “this Hebrew has been brought to us to make sport of us! He came in here to sleep with me, but I screamed. 15 When he heard me scream for help, he left his cloak beside me and ran out of the house.”

16 She kept his cloak beside her until his master came home. 17 Then she told him this story: “That Hebrew slave you brought us came to me to make sport of me. 18 But as soon as I screamed for help, he left his cloak beside me and ran out of the house.”

19 When his master heard the story his wife told him, saying, “This is how your slave treated me,” he burned with anger. 20 Joseph’s master took him and put him in prison, the place where the king’s prisoners were confined.

But while Joseph was there in the prison, 21 the Lord was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden. 22 So the warden put Joseph in charge of all those held in the prison, and he was made responsible for all that was done there. 23 The warden paid no attention to anything under Joseph’s care, because the Lord was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did.

Dr. Nathan Hare, Sociologist, Clinical Psychoiogist
photo Adam Turner

Comment from Dr. Nathan Hare

Who hasn’t been sexually harassed by a woman, I was sexually harassed by an adolescent female when I was six or seven years old, let alone now that I have become a man. I might cover it in passing ever so briefly in my memoirs I’m working on, if I can do it without taddling and the gods give me two or three more years free of earthly foolishness to fulfill.

Nathan Hare

Marvin X
photo Adam Turner

Marvin X Replies 

Well, I was raped by a woman.  She was one of my sister's friends who demanded I leave my sister's house and go home with her to be her boy-toy for the night. I was in bed but she demanded I get up and leave with her because, according to her, I had the best dick in the Bay, so I had to give it up. I was so disgusted being treated like a piece of meat! I have suffered trauma ever since. LOL

Dr. Nathan Hare Comments

I knowed it. I knew it was something. LOL

P.S. You said you were raped. Did you go willingly or were you forced. I know it wasn’t your idea and you had mixed emotions or mixed up feelings, but did she force you into the physiological potency of the moment, even if it wasn’t expressly or initially consensual? Just trying to keep it real.

Marvin X replies

My sister told her to leave me alone but she told my sister, "Fuck you bitch, yo brother going home with me." She pulled me out of my bed. "Git yo motherfuckin' ass up nigguh. I want some dick tonight!"  

a page from JOURNAL OF BLACK POETRY, MARVIN X GUEST EDITOR, 1969

Black Bird Press News & Review: PARABLE OF THE PARROT AND THE PAN AFRICAN REVOLUTION

Black Bird Press News & Review: PARABLE OF THE PARROT AND THE PAN AFRICAN REVOLUTION

Parable of Trinkets, Gadgets and the African Revolution by Marvin X

Parable of Trinkets & Gadgets

Parable of Trinkets & Gadgets

On the roadside a man was selling trinkets and gadgets of every kind, rocks, shells, skins,
electronic equipment, giant screen televisions, Ipads, Ipods,
blackberries, redberries,
even bodies and the souls of men were for sale.

Stopping by was a fleet of Mercedes full of kings, prime ministers and presidents for
life. They fought each other on the roadside for the precious rocks and
metals, animal skins, even wigs and huge plastic containers of bleaching
cream, a precious mineral for their wives--their body guards pointing
AK47s at each other to get first choice at the items from the world of
make believe and conspicuous consumption.

One king only wanted high tech gadgets, although his kingdom was in drought and famine, had
no clean water, but a dungeon full of political prisoners. A prime
minister wanted precious animal skins for his many wives. A president
for life wanted rocks and precious metals although his country was full
of people with HIV/AIDS. There were no clinics, no drugs,no clean water,
no clean needles, no doctors, no nurses in his nation. The doctors and
nurses all went abroad to Europe where they could earn better wages.

Another prime minister bought virgins for his harem , so he could entertain
foreign guests while they plundered his land and make electronic money
transfers to Europe and America, one and the same, thank you God for
this precious knowledge.

Business was so brisk there was a traffic jam on the road, mainly caused by the fleet of Mercedes
competing for parking space along the road. Of course some of them
double parked on the single lane road.

The bodyguards pulled their weapons on each other to secure parking space. If one Mercedes
accidentally hit another, the guards would shoot at each playfully. A
king would wave his hand out the window and they would stop shooting
into the air.

When the vendors quickly sold out trinkets and gadgets, the VIPs were on their way, the fleet of cars leaving in a
cloud of dust to their respective nations or to the nearest airport.
--Marvin X
5/31/10

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support the diaspora marketplace at the berkeley flea market, sat, dec 2--buy black, live black, love black, die black

BAMBD calls for community support of the Berkeley Flea Market

Marvin X

Friday February 24, 2017 -
 

Remember the time when the Berkeley Flea Market was the chief market place of North American Africans and Africans from the Diaspora? Remember when it was the crossroads of Pan African culture in the Bay? Well, if vendors and shoppers don't rush to keep it alive, it is in serious danger of closing down. The non-profit corporation which operates the Flea Market at the ASHBY BART Station are threatening to close the market on Sundays because they cannot afford the expense of Sundays due to the low turnout of vendors and customers. A petition circulated demanded it remain open on Sundays but it is a business and no business can remain operating in the red! This is an economic reality.

Of course we know gentrification or ethnic cleansing has decimated the North American population in Berkeley, the Bay Area and throughout the US. Thus it is no surprise the ASHBY Flea Market is in dire straights. But we think it can be resuscitated with Pan African Unity, otherwise it will join the dustbin of history of other cultural/economic districts such as West Oakland and the Fillmore in San Francisco.

ASHBY Flea Market organizers called upon Oakland poet/playwright/organizer/planner Marvin X and the Black Arts Movement Cultural and Business District (BAMBD) planners to assist in a revival of the Berkeley Flea Market. The BAMBD planners have agreed to help in the resuscitation of the market so vital to Berkeley's Pan African identity, even though BAMBD planners realize the ASHBY Flea Market may suffer a fate similar to the BAMBD unless there are investment partnership agreements with Berkeley developers who eye the flea market space as ideal for expanding the long planned Berkeley corridor from downtown Berkeley through the Lorin District to downtown Oakland which will erase the traditional North American African presence in South Berkeley. Alas, this is why the cause is lost unless North American Africans and those of the Diaspora unite in Pan African unity to push back those reactionary pseudo liberal whites who have no qualms about further displacement of North American Africans in Berkeley. For a clearer perspective on how North American Africans view their situation, we suggest they check in with Berkeley NAACP president Al Mansour who has described the fight for space and place as ethnic cleansing, to the utter dismay of Berkeley's pseudo liberal whites. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, said "I'd rather deal with the KKK than pseudo white liberals.!"

The BAMB will do all we can to keep the ASHBY Flea Market alive as a symbol and reality of North American African cultural and economic identity and independence. But your help is needed as vendors, cultural workers, artists and customers. We are begging you to vend at the ASHBY Flea Market; we are begging you to shop at the market in the name of self-determination and cooperative economics. Let's bring this cultural and economic entity back to it's former glory as the cross-roads of Bay Area cultural livelihood!

At present, other ethnic groups benefit from our consumerism addiction of spending with other than our own kind, even at the ASHBY Flea Market. There are a plethora of ethnic groups who sell to us but will never buy from us. This has got to stop. I talk about this in my Parable of the Donkey. North American Africans are the donkey of the world: any ethnic group can set up shop in our community and prosper, send money back to their home countries while we go down down down.

I was elated this morning at the ASHBY Flea Market when I purchased coffee and peace cobbler from a sister and she gave me change with bills marked with red, black and green, the colors of the Pan African nation. She said her mother had told her to mark bills in this manner. I informed her I shall mark all my bills the same way.

In conversation with the Flea Market organizers, they told me to celebrate Black History Month every month. I agreed to do so in our newspaper The Movement. After all, we are not Black/African in February, but 24/7, so we shall do so in our newspaper beginning with the March issue, celebrating  Herstory Month.

 Quitta, Prosperity and Marvin X at his Wake Up Booth, Berkeley Flea Market

Marvin X fans at the Berkeley Flea Market

Marvin X teaches at the berkeley flea market, sells his books and newspaper The Movement

rev jesse jackson has parkinson's

News

Nov 17 2017, 3:05 pm ET

Rev. Jesse Jackson, 76, reveals he has Parkinson’s disease

by Dan Corey

Prominent civil rights activist the Rev. Jesse Jackson has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he announced Friday.
“My family and I began to notice changes about three years ago,” Jackson, 76, said in a statement. “After a battery of tests, my physicians identified the issue as Parkinson's disease, a disease that bested my father.”
A neurological disorder with no known cure, Parkinson’s is commonly associated with tremors, stiffness and difficulty with walking and balancing.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson (L) and Rev. Michael Pfleger carry crosses as they march against gun violence on Michigan Avenue on December 31, 2016, in Chicago. Scott Olson / Getty Images

Northwestern Medicine in Chicago said in a statement that Jackson was diagnosed with the disease in 2015 and has been treated as an outpatient in the years since.
Congressman Danny Davis, D-Chicago, told NBC Chicago that those who have been close to Jackson recently "have noticed some of the signs."
Jackson also said that “recognition of the effects of this disease on me has been painful” and that he has “been slow to grasp the gravity of it.”
Jackson was born in Greenville, South Carolina, and later became known for participating in civil rights demonstrations alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He later ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988.
Related: Gut Bacteria May Affect Parkinson’s, Study Finds
In 1999, Jackson was credited with successfully negotiating the release of three U.S. soldiers who were held in Yugoslavia, and was awarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for those efforts from President Bill Clinton in 2000.
“I know Jesse Jackson will keep hope alive as he battles Parkinson’s disease and continues his tireless commitment to justice and civil rights,” Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., said on Twitter. “Praying for him and his family.”
In an Instagram video, the Rev. Al Sharpton said he spent the last few days with Jackson and others in New York and reflected on his impact on American politics and civil rights movement.
“As I watched him, I thought about the greatness of this man,” Sharpton, an MSNBC host, said in the video. “How he continued Martin Luther King’s movement for justice, how he cemented it in the North and made the King movement truly national … He changed the nation, he served in ways he never got credit. No one in our lifetime served longer and stronger. We pray for him, because he’s given his life for us.”

Rev. Jesse Jackson reacts after projections show that Sen. Barack Obama will be elected to serve as the next president during a gathering in Grant Park on November 4, 2008, in Chicago. Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Jackson described his Parkinson’s diagnosis as “a signal that I must make lifestyle changes and dedicate myself to physical therapy in hopes of slowing the disease's progression.”
“It is an opportunity for me to use my voice to help in finding a cure for a disease that afflicts 7 to 10 million worldwide,” he said in a statement. “Some 60,000 Americans are diagnosed with Parkinson’s every year.”
Although Parkinson’s is considered to be the most complex disease in medicine, it is also very treatable, Dr. Michael Okun, the national medical director for the Parkinson’s Foundation and chair of the University of Florida's neurology department, told NBC News.
“It’s pretty common for 76-year-old men to have Parkinson’s disease,” Okun said. “As the population ages, we’re going to see more and more people, particularly men, diagnosed with Parkinson’s.”
Related: How Patients Are Using Cycling to Slow Down Parkinson's
Jackson’s plan to combat Parkinson’s is likely to help slow the progression of his symptoms, but won’t cure the disease, NBC News medical correspondent Dr. John Torres said.
Jackson already has the two major risk factors for Parkinson’s disease, Torres said.
“Basically he’s got an advanced age, and he’s got a family history of Parkinson’s, so that’s going to make his outlook worse,” Torres said. “What’s going to make it better is more physical activity, family and social support and appropriate medication to slow the symptoms. But eventually the disease going to catch up with him.”
Parkinson’s patients typically live for six to 22 more years after their initial diagnosis.
Most recently, Jackson spoke out against President Donald Trump’s proposed wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, comparing Latinos and Mexicans who would help build it to “blacks building slave ships.” He also urged Hispanics and communities of color to unite under shared values.
Jackson also spoke about the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, generating a national conversation about race relations with law enforcement.