Jonathan Jackson (Illinois politician)

Jackson has also showcased the travails of Oscar Walden, who in 1952 became Illinois's first exoneree.

Walden was freed after being sentenced to 75 years for a rape he did not commit.

Jonathan Luther Jackson (born January 7, 1966) is an American politician, businessman, and activist serving as the U.S. representative for IL's 1st congressional district since 2023.

A member of the Democratic Party, he was previously the national spokesman for the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, a financial analyst, and a partner in the Chicago-based beer distributorship River North Sales and Service.

Jackson was born in Chicago, to Jesse Jackson, a noted civil rights activist and Baptist minister, and Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson.

His godfather was Martin Luther King Jr., from whom Jackson gets his middle name.

Jackson has five siblings, Santita Jackson and former U.S. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr.., his elders, and Yusef, Jacqueline Jackson, and Ashley, his younger siblings.

Jackson attended Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in Chicago, where he was a student-athlete.

He attended his parents' alma mater, North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, North Carolina, to study business where he obtained his bachelors degree.

He is also an MBA graduate of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Born into a family steeped in human rights activism, Jackson has traveled the world as an aide de camp to his father.

Jackson has championed the cause of Johnnie Lee Savory, a Peoria native convicted of stabbing to death his friends Connie Cooper and James Robinson in their Peoria home in 1977.

The deal was met with charges of skepticism and nepotism because Jackson's father had previously organized a boycott of the brewery's products in the early 1980s.

The elder Jackson wanted the brewery to do more business in the African-American community.

He traveled to Syria in 1983, when his father negotiated with Syrian President Hafez al-Assad to release captured American pilot Robert Goodman.

They include Darrell Cannon, who faced the death penalty for a 1983 drug-related murder.

He met Fidel Castro in 1984, when his father negotiated the release of 22 Americans being held in Cuba.

Jackson started his career in 1988 at Drexel Burnham Lambert as an investment analyst for Michael Milken, an American financier and philanthropist, noted for his role in developing a market for high-yield bonds known as junk bonds.

Jackson later worked as an analyst at Independence Bank, was a Shatkin Arbor runner at the Chicago Board of Trade, and developed real estate for East Lake Management in Chicago.

He rejoined Milken at Knowledge Universe in the late 1990s and engages in investments in the wireless, real estate and distribution sectors.

In 1998, Jackson, with his brother Yusef, became owner of a Chicago-based Anheuser-Busch Cos.

distributorship – River North Sales and Service, LLC.

Cannon was released after accepting a January 2001 deal to abandon his torture claim in exchange for being released, according to the Northwestern Center on Wrongful Convictions.

He was also with his father in August 2005, when he traveled to Venezuela to meet Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

This followed controversial remarks by televangelist Pat Robertson implying that Chávez should be assassinated.

Jackson condemned Robertson's remarks as immoral.

After serving over 28 years in prison, Savory was released on parole on December 19, 2006.

Jackson is among several notables who have petitioned the Illinois governor—first Rod Blagojevich, then Pat Quinn—to order DNA testing in Savory's case to prove not only that did Savory not kill his friends, but also to pinpoint the person widely suspected of committing the crime.

In 2007, Jonathan Jackson took on the issues of innocence and juvenile justice as national spokesman for the RainbowPUSH Coalition.

He has highlighted the personal stories and continued trials of those who accused the Chicago Police Department of torturing them to obtain confessions that landed them in prison.

In 2008, Jackson turned his attention to the closures of Chicago Public Schools.

He has led several schools to public hearings and civic education training to thwart school closures and turnarounds by private companies in favor of investing in existing schools and keeping a community's institutional memory intact—especially in highly mobile neighborhoods where large numbers of students are homeless or living on the economic margins.

In 2009, Jackson lead a group of minority investors in a $250 million bid to take over ION Media Networks, the country's largest chain of independent TV stations.

In February 2010, he succeeded in helping Guggenheim Elementary School get off the closure list.

Guggenheim is in the Englewood community on the city's South Side.

Jackson, among others, made the case that forcing students to walk any further to school put them in harm's way.

They also made the case that Guggenheim's test scores have steadily improved and it had a close-knit community with the momentum to achieve further gains.

Previously, Jackson had persuaded school officials to abandon plans to close Holmes Elementary School, among others.

Jackson's view of outsourcing public education mirrors that of an emerging vocal group of educators like New York University's Diane Ravitch and activists who assert that over-reliance on test scores and privatizing of public schools through wholesale charters and outsourcing allows schools to cherry-pick their student bodies while siphoning resources from the most marginalized children.

They consider programs like No Child Left Behind and charter schools as a divestment of public education.