Jesse Jackson returns to South Carolina to lie in state
After a long career fighting for civil rights, the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. is visiting home one last time to lie in state in the southern U.S. capital of South Carolina.
His latest accolades from his home state are a far cry from his childhood in segregated Greenville, where in 1960 he couldn’t go to the much better-funded whites-only branch of the local library to pick up a book he needed.
Jackson took seven black high school students to this segregated branch, where they sat and read books and magazines until they were arrested. Branches closed, then quietly reopened for everyone.
With this action, Jackson began his career and struggle fighting for equality for all. She would come to the attention of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and participate in the voting rights march that King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Jackson died on February 17 at the age of 84 after struggling with a rare neurological disorder that affected his mobility and ability to speak in later years.
South Carolina services are part of two weeks of events. It all started with Jackson’s body lying motionless, and the public was invited to the Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s Chicago headquarters last week.
After South Carolina, Jackson will return to Chicago for a massive celebration of life gathered at a megachurch and final homecoming rites at Rainbow PUSH’s headquarters. The ceremony to be held in Washington DC to honor him has been postponed to a later date.
Nationally, Jackson advocated for the poor and those underrepresented in voting rights, job opportunities, education, and health care. He won diplomatic victories with world leaders.
Through the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, he pressured executives to make America a more open and equal society by channeling cries for Black pride and self-determination into corporate boardrooms.
After King’s assassination, he rose to prominence as a torchbearer of the Civil Rights Movement and ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988.
Jackson remained active in his home state; In 2003, he pushed for Greenville County to honor King by matching the federal holiday in his honor, and in 2015, by advocating for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds after nine Black worshipers were killed in a racist shooting at a church in Charleston.
Jackson is the second Black man in the state to be in the South Carolina capital.
State Sen. Clementa Pinckney was honored after she was shot and killed in the 2015 Charleston church shooting.
