Jesse Jackson, 84, died Tuesday at his home in Chicago. His life’s work changed the country in fundamental ways, laying the bedrock for a broader acceptance of African Americans in all walks of life.

Though controversy seemed to always surround him while working with Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council during the mid-1960s and later after King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, he would successfully form the Rainbow PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) Coalition in 1971, and years later establish the National Rainbow Coalition, a platform for his presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988.

A student of theology, he used the cadence of gospel rhetoric in stirring speeches throughout his career to great effect.

“My constituency,” he proclaimed at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, “is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised. They are restless and seek relief.”

In 1988, Jackson ran a strong campaign picking up seven million votes in primaries, even though Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis was the eventual nominee. Even so he continued to campaign hard as a vice-presidential choice. According to a New York Times obituary, Jackson’s convention speech that year in Atlanta “electrified” those at the convention, recalling his own story of “overcoming poverty and abandonment with the aspirations of those represented by his Rainbow Coalition, coming back again and again to the search for ‘common ground’ and to all those forgotten corners of American life. ‘Call you outcast, low down, you can’t make it, you’re nothing, you’re from nobody, subclass, underclass, when you see Jesse Jackson, when my name goes in nomination, your name goes in nomination. I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me. And it wasn’t born in you, and you can make it.’”

He ended the speech repeating the refrain “Keep hope alive!” four times, a speech, The Times wrote, that was “immediately hailed as an American political classic.”

“With his gospel of seeking common ground,” the Times wrote, “and his demands for respect for those seldom accorded it, Mr. Jackson… enunciated a progressive vision that defined the soul of the Democratic Party, if not necessarily its policies, in the last decades of the 20^th century. It was a vision, animated by the civil rights era, in which an inclusive coalition of people of color and others who had been at the periphery of American life would now move to the forefront and transform it.”

Much of Jackson’s work, along with others, laid the groundwork for the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. In praising Jackson’s “lifetime of service,” Obama called him a “true giant,” adding that “We stood on his shoulders.”

Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders hailed Jackson as “one of the very most significant political leaders in this country in the last 100 years. Jesse’s contribution to modern history is not just bringing us together; it is bringing us together around a progressive agenda.”

The contrast to today’s politics, in which white supremacists are ascendant in the Republican Party and an overtly racist president extols the virtues of policies that denigrate Americans who are not part of his increasingly narrow base, is too stark to ignore and a commentary of its own.

It’s also reason to join the fight today against such a limiting vision of American greatness, strength and vitality.

Jackson often spoke of the power of unity and of bringing the American people together to overcome the nation’s biggest problems. In his 1998 convention speech, Jackson told a story of his grandmother, too poor to afford a blanket in Greenville, South Carolina to keep the family warm, taking pieces of old cloth, “only patches, barely good enough to wipe off your shoes with” and sewing them into a quilt, calling it “a thing of beauty and power and culture.”

“Be as wise as my grandmama,” Jackson implored Democrats with a theme that is as relevant today. “Pull the patches together, bound by a common thread. When we form a great quilt of unity and common ground, we’ll have the power to bring about health care and housing and jobs and education and hope to our nation. We, the people, can win.”

Angelo Lynn