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An icon of the civil rights movement, the Rev Jesse Jackson has campaigned for equality at great personal cost. But a penchant for controversy â€" and his criticism of Barack Obama â€" has dogged his recent efforts. Fifty years after he staged his first protest against segregation, the firebrand explains why he's still fighting

The Reverend Jesse Jackson does not so much enter a room as rearrange its molecules around him. When he comes into the lobby of a London hotel, you can sense his arrival before you see him, as though the sheer force of his personality has displaced the air. He is physically imposing â€" more than 6ft tall with broad shoulders and a boxer's bulk â€" and walks slowly, oozing a sense of purpose. He is, it must be said, quite terrifying to behold.

When we meet, he looks me straight in the eye, takes my hand and bends to kiss it. The chivalrous gesture sits oddly with his intimidating presence and although it is no doubt intended to be charming, I am left with the impression that the charm is being calculatedly deployed to get me onside. As we sit down he leans forward courteously to ask my name. A few minutes later he forgets and has to ask again.

Perhaps it is the jet lag: Jackson is in the UK for a whistle-stop tour, taking in meetings at the Houses of Parliament before giving an address at the Cambridge Union and flying home to Chicago. He is trailed by a substantial entourage of dark-suited men carrying laptops and briefcases. One of them insists on fitting me with a microphone so that our encounter can be filmed for posterity and posted on Jackson's website. The others seat themselves in close proximity like worker bees attending their queen. The hotel staff, seemingly aware that greatness is in their midst, start scurrying around attentively.

It is perhaps not surprising that Jesse Jackson, civil rights campaigner, Baptist preacher and sometime politician, inspires such awe. At 68, he has devoted most of his life to campaigning for the oppressed. Once one of Martin Luther King's closest aides, Jackson has been at the vanguard of the civil rights movement for the past five decades â€" and he is still fighting.

"We are free but not equal," he says, thumping out his sentences with the lyrical vigour of someone delivering a particularly inspiring sermon. The acolytes stop tapping their BlackBerries and fall into a respectful silence. "We're free to vote, but if you look at the black population â€" defined as African, Asian and Caribbean â€" if you look at infant mortality, life expectancy, unemployment, access to capital, to business development, if you look in prisons, if you look at who's at Cambridge and Oxford, if you measure that today, the majority is free but not equal. That is today's challenge."

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins, a series of non-violent protests that started when four black students from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat at the "whites-only" lunch counter in Woolworths. In July 1960, five months later, the 19-year-old Jackson instigated a similar protest in the segregated public library in his hometown of Greenville, South Carolina. He went on to become a leader of the sit-in movement. "Once the flame was lit, it caught fire," he says, his words slurring together in his languid Southern drawl.

And yet despite Jackson's heroic attempts to make the world a more egalitarian place, over the years his firebrand rhetoric and headline-grabbing antics have mired much of his story in controversy. His critics claim he is an opportunist, flinging himself before the cameras whenever a new racial crisis springs up. They point to his penchant for dubious theatrics, such as his turning up to be interviewed in a TV studio the day after Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968 wearing a turtleneck stained with the dead man's blood. Then there are his ill-judged public outbursts: two years ago he criticised Barack Obama, then running for president, when he thought a TV microphone was turned off. He claimed he wanted to cut Obama's "nuts off" for "talking down to black people" and "telling niggers how to behave". He subsequently apologised and insists he remains a fervent Obama supporter â€" in fact, one of the abiding images of election night is of Jackson standing among the crowds in Chicago's Grant Park with tears streaming down his face.

Did he regret saying what he did? "Yes. You grow. Sometimes you make mistakes. What is a standard joke 20 years ago, is not a joke anymore. ... Culture changes people suggest levels of dignity, you reduce the area that 's acceptable. And sometimes You can say, very, very bad unnoticed for these reasons. "

Still, there was a feeling in some circles that Jackson, bruised and battered by his failed presidential bids, was bitter at the younger man's comparatively easy rise. Jackson started to look out of step with the public mood. In 2008 the rapper Nas, one of a new generation of black Americans, accused him of being yesterday's man. "His time is up," Nas said. "We heard your voice, we saw your marching, we heard your sermons. We don't wanna hear that shit. It's a new day. It's a new voice… We don't need Jesse… We got Barack."

In fact, according to David Remnick's new book Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama , Obama sought Jackson's blessing to stand for election to the Illinois Senate in 1996. As Remnick said recently: "There is not Barack Obama without Jesse Jackson. Jackson, for all his faults, did an enormous historical good by breaking down the barriers toward the political imagination of having a successful African-American presidential candidate."

So, I ask Jackson, why did Obama succeed where he himself failed? Jackson grins. "Besides his being brilliant? It's time. Timing. I would say he ran the last lap of a 60-year race." And perhaps, also, there was a belief among white Americans that Obama, with his mixed-race parentage and international outlook, would be a safer pair of hands. Obama was seen as a conciliatory figure, whereas Jackson was frequently pigeonholed as the angry pugilist.

"Those who had to knock down walls were scarred," Jackson concedes. "We faced jailing trying to get the right to vote, and beatings like dogs. I was jailed… The generation that came behind was able to face ahead without so much of a headwind. That's why, on election night, I began to cry. I didn't realise I was crying, but I was crying because of the joy of the moment: all the people around the world â€" in South Africa, in Haiti, in Ireland, with all the struggles they were involved in â€" were pulling for this guy to win… And I thought about the journey, and I wished Dr King and the moderates who were killed just for being in the wrong moment could have been there to see the fruits of their labours. I felt the experience. That's why that was such a huge moment for me and in American history, for all of us. All history, really."

Does injustice still make him as angry as it used to? "No, it inspires me to fight on. Anger would blind you. One must have the strength not to be angry, not bitter, because anger and bitterness can consume… People are more inspired by hope than they are by fear; they are inspired more by love than they are by hate."

Jesse Jackson is a son of the segregated South, born in the same year as Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black boy murdered in a town in Mississippi in 1955 after reportedly wolf-whistling at a white woman. He was raised in a three-bedroom shack with a tin roof, with no running water, the offspring of an affair between his teenage mother, Helen Burns, and fellow Greenville resident Noah Robinson, a former boxer and married father of three.

Two years later Helen married Charles Henry Jackson, a janitor â€" at 16, Jesse was adopted by his stepfather. Now any questions about his difficult early years are blankly ignored. He is not rude, but simply pretends not to have heard. When I ask about his father, Jackson refers to Charles, not Noah. His 85-year-old mother is the only one of his parents still alive. "Every time I call her she says: 'A lot of people love you now, son, but I loved you first.'" He laughs. "Usually she has a Bible verse for anything I'm going through." He credits her with giving him "a sense of self-worth and self-respect".

But his childhood experiences of racial discrimination left a lasting impression. When Jackson was six, his stepfather, who had fought for the Allies in the Second World War, was forced to take a part-time job mowing the lawn of a white German émigré. "I said: 'Dad, this guy talks funny,' and I turned around and saw that he was crying. It crushed me to see my father cry. He said: 'I went to fight the war â€" we were fighting him and now I'm cutting his grass,' and he was humiliated by it."

Did witnessing his father's humiliation make him angry? "No, the fact is, we were not sensitive to how damaging the system of segregation was. We learned to adjust and live in the smallest corner of the room, so to speak.

It is hard not to find oneself slightly hypnotised by the power of Jackson's words. He talks with such rhythm and practised eloquence. It is an example of what Manning Marable, the author of a forthcoming biography of Malcolm X, calls the "messianic style" of public speaking, heavily influenced by the church, which was the focal point for political resistance in black communities.

Jackson is a master of it, peppering his rousing oratory with biblical passages and an impressive recital of dates and facts relating to anything from the colonial history of Haiti to the football tactics of Chelsea. He can talk for several minutes without interruption, letting his ideas wash over me until I am veritably drenched by rhetoric and gasping for air.

He really is quite formidable, and there are obviously still many, many things he would like to get off his chest. The Iraq war, for instance, which he sees as a flagrant attack on "international law, human rights, self-determination, shared economic security". Would he like to see the leaders who took us to war in Iraq â€" George W Bush and Tony Blair â€" stand trial at The Hague? "Whoever engages in wars without justification [should stand trial]. No one should live outside the law."

As he approaches his 70th birthday (and his Old Testament allowance of three score years and 10), it is clear that Jackson, who is married to his childhood sweetheart and has five children, remains determined to stay in public life. His reputation was dented in 2001 by the revelation that he had fathered a secret daughter from an adulterous relationship with a former employee, but one gets the sense that Jackson could survive almost anything.

He has always been something of a loose cannon, a man convinced of his own rightness and possessed of the certainty that rules can be broken. But for all those who are put off by a certain swagger in his personality, there are thousands more who owe their freedom in part to Jackson's persistence. According to the late Marshall Frady, a former civil rights reporter who wrote an acclaimed 1996 biography of Jackson, he is driven by a desire to become a "moral-heroic" figure and yet is prevented by his outsider status. "This may be the most fundamental, elemental conflict in him," wrote Frady. His fate was "forever to be an unfinished hero".

Does Jackson feel he never got the recognition he deserved? He is too smart to answer directly, instead choosing to quote from Proverbs 22: "Remove not the ancient landmarks that our mothers and fathers have set…" he says in sonorous tones. "Each successive generation inherited the benefit of the struggles, and the wisest among us appreciate their contribution."

He stares at me for several seconds, his tired eyes drooping at the corners, the flesh on his cheeks sagging with age. He looks exhausted. How would he like history to remember him? Jackson blinks. "I'm going to serve to the end," he says, his voice edged with weariness. The interview is over. Jackson pushes himself up from the chair, exhaling heavily. The entourage starts unplugging laptops and gathering up files of paper. My microphone is removed. Jackson is ushered into another room for a radio interview, and just before the door closes I catch a final glimpse of a solitary figure in a dark suit, his shoulders erect, his head held high, forever the unfinished hero.

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