(Reuters) – Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and his wife are “responding positively” to treatments after catching COVID-19, their son said in a statement on Sunday.
Physicians at the Northwestern University Memorial Hospital in Chicago are carefully monitoring Jackson, 79, and his wife, Jacqueline, 77, because of their ages, a day after the two were hospitalised, their son Jonathan said https://bit.ly/3gk30p1 in a statement issued by the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a group founded by his father. [
“Both are resting comfortably and are responding positively to their treatments,” he said.
Jackson, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017, has been a leader of the U.S. civil rights movement since the mid-1960s and was with Martin Luther King when he was assassinated in 1968.
Jackson sought the Democratic presidential nomination twice in the 1980s, but fell short of becoming the first Black major party White House nominee.
He was awarded the Legion d’Honneur by French president Emmanuel Macron in July, one of France’s highest honours, in recognition of what he called “a long walk towards emancipation and justice”.
(Reporting by Bhargav Acharya and Jahnavi Nidumolu in Bengaluru; Editing by Gerry Doyle)
