COLUMBIA, S.C. — After a long career of fighting for civil rights, the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. is visiting his home for one last time to lie in state at the South Carolina capitol on Monday.
The final full honors from the state where he was born is a far cry from his childhood in segregated Greenville, where in 1960 he couldn’t go inside the local library’s much better funded whites-only branch to check out a book he needed.
Jackson led seven Black high school students into that segregated branch, where they sat down and read books and magazines until they were arrested. The branches closed, then quietly reopened for all.
With that action, Jackson launched his career — and crusade — fighting for equality for all. He would catch the attention of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and join the voting rights march King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Jackson died Feb. 17 at age 84 after battling a rare neurological disorder that affected his mobility and ability to speak in his later years.
The South Carolina services are part of two weeks of events. It began with Jackson’s body lying in repose and the public invited last week to his Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s Chicago headquarters.
After South Carolina, Jackson will be returned to Chicago for a large celebration of life gathering at a megachurch and the final homegoing services at the headquarters of Rainbow PUSH. Plans for a service in Washington, D.C., to honor him have been postponed until a later date.
Nationally, Jackson advocated for the poor and underrepresented for voting rights, job opportunities, education and health care. He scored diplomatic victories with world leaders.
Trough his Rainbow PUSH Coalition, he channeled cries for Black pride and self-determination into corporate boardrooms, pressuring executives to make America a more open and equitable society. He stepped forward as the Civil Rights Movement’s torchbearer after King’s assassination, and would run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988.
Jackson continued to be active in his home state, pushing in 2003 for Greenville County to honor King by matching the federal holiday in his honor and in 2015 by advocating for removing the Confederate flag from South Carolina Statehouse grounds after nine Black worshipers were killed in a racist shooting at a Charleston church.
Jackson is just the second Black man to lie in state at the South Carolina capitol. State Sen. Clementa Pinckney was honored in 2015 after he was shot and killed in the Charleston church shooting.
