Jesse Jackson, a leader of the Civil Rights Movement and a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., changed the world...and also had the ideal '70’s mutton chop down.

Born in Greenville, South Carolina, Jesse is the son of Helen Burns, a high school student at the time of Jesse’s birth and Noah Robinson, her 33-year-old married neighbor. Escándalo! Two years later Helen married Charles Jackson, a post office maintenance worker, who later adopted little Jesse. Despite the adoption, Jesse still remained close with his biological father, who may or may not have thought that Jesse was kind of a weirdo. Noah Robinson recalled, “Jesse was an unusual kind of fella, even when he was just learning to talk. He would say he's going to be a preacher. He would say, 'I'm going to lead people through the rivers of the water.’” This may have worried Noah and Helen, as it might any parent, but Jesse grew up to be a smart, athletic, popular kid. He was elected class president of his high school and, after rejecting an invitation to play minor league baseball, attended University of Illinois on a football scholarship for one year. He finished his degree in sociology at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro in 1964. By this time he had already gotten married to a classmate, Jacqueline Brown and had the first of his five children, something an undergraduate me would not take on well.

It was in Greensboro, where Jesse Jackson got his first taste of the Civil Rights Movement. He joined the Congress of Racial Equality and later organized student support while studying at the Chicago Theological Seminary. After meeting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson dropped out of the seminary, three classes short of his masters, to work full-time for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He was eventually still ordained in 1968, he just had more important things to do first. He became one of King’s inner circle and was present when King was assassinated on his motel room balcony. There was a rift in leadership of the SCLC after King’s murder, so Jackson split off and founded People United to Save Humanity or “PUSH.” I’m sure you can guess what their mission was. It’s rather self-explanatory.

After what seems like a lifetime of work on the Civil Rights Movement, Jackson decided to run for president in 1984 and 1988. There was a setback in his 1984 campaign due to an antisemitic comment that may or may not have cost him the election. He was the first and only African-American candidate to get even remotely close to being elected until Barack Obama.

All in all Jackson’s life has been wild. He pushed forward the Civil Rights Movement and continues to be a leader in American politics. In 2001 it was outed that he had an illegitimate daughter and in 2017 he announced that he had Parkinson’s disease.