COLUMBIA, S.C. — After a long career fighting for civil rights, the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. visits his home one last time to lie in state at the South Carolina State Capitol on Monday.
The final, full honor from the state of his birth is a far cry from his childhood in segregated Greenville, where in 1960 he couldn’t go to the better-funded whites-only branch of the local library to check out a book he needed.
Jackson led seven black high school students to that segregated branch, where they sat and read books and magazines until they were arrested. The branches closed, then quietly reopened for everyone.
With this action, Jackson began his career—and his crusade—in the fight for equality for all. He would catch the attention of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and join the voting rights march that King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Jackson died on February 17 at the age of 84 after battling a rare neurological disorder that affected his mobility and ability to speak in his final years.
The South Carolina services are part of the two weeks of events. It began with Jackson’s body lying in rest and the public was invited last week to the Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s headquarters in Chicago.
After South Carolina, Jackson will return to Chicago for a major Celebration of Life gathering at a megachurch and final homecoming services at Rainbow PUSH headquarters. Plans for a prayer service in Washington, D.C., to honor him have been postponed to a later date.
Nationally, Jackson advocated for the poor and underrepresented regarding voting rights, job opportunities, education, and health care. He achieved diplomatic victories with world leaders.
Through the Rainbow PUSH coalition, he takes cries for black pride and self-determination to corporate boardrooms and pressures CEOs to make America a more open and equitable society. He would step forward as a torchbearer for the civil rights movement after King’s assassination, and would run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988.
Jackson has continued his activism in his home state, pushing in 2003 for Greenville County to honor King by matching a federal holiday in his honor, and in 2015 by calling for the Confederate flag to be removed from South Carolina grounds after nine black worshipers were killed in a racist shooting at a Charleston church.
Jackson is the second Black man to lie in state at the South Carolina State Capitol. State Sen. Clementa Pinckney was honored in 2015 after he was shot and killed in the Charleston church shooting.
Associated Press writer Sophia Tarin in Chicago contributed to this report.
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