(Reuters) -U.S. civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who has Parkinson’s disease, left the hospital on Tuesday after falling and hitting his head the day before at Howard University.
The 80-year-old reverend said in a video that he was grateful to the staff at the historically Black university’s hospital in Washington, D.C.
“I want to express my thanks to the doctors and nurses at Howard University for giving me the best of service,” said Jackson, who had a bandage on the left side of his forehead and was surrounded by medical professionals.
“One of the tendencies when you have Parkinson’s is it affects your speech and your stability, so I fell and I came to the hospital, really, more for a check up than anything else.”
Jackson 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.
Howard University announced on Twitter on Monday that Jackson was taken to the hospital by a university administrator.
Broadcaster CNN said the results of Jackson’s medical tests proved normal, and hospital officials decided to keep him overnight for observation.
Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a group founded by Jackson, confirmed https://cnn.it/2ZS90jN to CNN that he fell and hit his head on entering a campus building. The group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Jackson said he planned to continue meeting with university leaders and student protesters, who are demanding better living conditions on campus, in an effort to resolve the dispute.
Jackson was hospitalized in August after testing positive for COVID-19. He unsuccessfully sought to become the first Black presidential nominee of a major party when he ran in the Democratic Party’s primaries twice in the 1980s.
(Reporting by Radhika Anilkumar in Bengaluru; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Cynthia Osterman)
