Speaking during his father’s memorial service on Saturday, March 7, Jesse Jackson Jr. sharply rebuked the three former presidents who had offered tributes to the deceased Jesse Jackson Sr. He argued that their overly political, partisan messages at a funeral showed they didn’t really know his father. For reference, the three presidents involved were Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.
As background, Jesse Jackson Sr. passed away on February 17, 2026. Known by many on the right as a radical leftist who used advocacy regarding racial issues to advance in his public career, he was beloved by the radical left and so his funeral became something the left wanted to attend en masse, leading to the delay in planning and the presence of the three former presidents.
The speeches they delivered were disasters. Former president Joe Biden, for instance, said, “If I told you I had a cleft palate or clubfoot, none of you would have laughed. But it’s OK to laugh at stuttering. … It’s the one place where people think you’re stupid.”Oh, really? I’m a h*ll of a lot smarter than most of you.”
Former President Biden also asserted that “the continent of Africa is going to be the largest continent in the world” to the funeral attendees. He said, “I remember telling Jesse that I knew I knew a guy, in South Africa. I was going to go see name is Nelson Mandela. And, I’m Jesse saying, how are you going? You guys actually see him, by the way? You know, the continent of Africa is going to be the largest continent in the world in terms of population of the year 2050, the largest in the entire world. Watch, man. Watch.”
In any case, Jackson Jr. said, in his rebuke of the three former presidents who had spoken about his father on Friday, March 6, “Yesterday I listened for several hours of three United States presidents who do not know Jesse Jackson.” He went on to insist that his father’s life wasn’t defined by the “political order”.
Emphasizing that point, Jackson Jr. insisted, “He maintained a tense relationship with the political order, not because the presidents were White or Black, but the demands of our message, the demands of speaking for the least of these — those who are disinherited, the damned, the dispossessed, the disrespected — demanded not Democratic or Republican solutions, but demanded a consistent, prophetic voice that at no point in time sold us out as a people.”
Watch him here:
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That mirrored what Jackson Jr. had said before. In the wake of his father’s passing, for example, he said, “Do not bring your politics out of respect to Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the life that he lived, to these ongoing services. Come respectful, and come to say thank you. But these ongoing services are welcome to ALL—Democrat, Republican, liberal, and conservative. Right-wing, left-wing. Because his life is broad enough to cover the full spectrum of what it means to be an American.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video