Flags were lowered to half-staff this morning in South Carolina, where civil rights icon and native son Rev. Jesse Jackson will become only the second Black man in history to lie in repose inside the state capitol building in Columbia, S.C. Jackson died in Chicago earlier this month. He was 84.

Though he spent the vast majority of his adult life in Chicago, Jackson was born in Greenville, S.C., during the height of segregation. Walking around his native hometown on “church Sunday,” one can see how his love of community coalesced among the hills and valleys that surrounded his childhood home at 20 Haynie Street. While the home looks untouched through the years, the street now bears his name.

Walking distance from the intersection at US Hwy 29 and SC Hwy 20, now “Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. Street,”is the Claussen Bakery Building, an old factory building surrounded by newer facades. A marker stands next to the structure, reminding those who pass it that in 1967, Rev. Jackson brought Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King there to support the almost two dozen Black employees who went on strike against discriminatory hiring and promotion practices at the bakery. Placed in 2017, the marker bears Jackson’s name in the struggle for fair wages and better working conditions for Black workers.

Rev. Jackson was forged in Greenville. Born Jesse Louis Burns on Oct. 8, 1941, to a Helen Burns, a beautician, and Noah Robinson, a worker whose job entailed grading the quality of cotton. Jackson’s mother would marry civil worker Charles Henry Jackson, the man whose surname Rev. Jackson took upon adoption in his teens.

In David Masciotra’s book, “I Am Somebody,” Rev. Jackson expressed how his mother influenced his path. “If I have ever shown desire to help those who most need it–if I’ve ever been successful in that mission, it is because of my mother,” he said.

At Sterling High School in Greenville, Jackson was an honor student, class president, and an athlete. Lucinda Jones-Martin, a 1969 graduate of Sterling High School and a 1973 graduate of North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College in Greensboro (Jackson’s alma mater), said all Jesse Louis did was play ball.

The Sterling Community Center sits where the high school used to, up a hill from a football field where over a dozen Black middle and high school students who are part of a mentorship/STEM program ran drills with their coaches the Sunday prior to Jackson lying in state at the State House.

Jackson received a football scholarship from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While home for the holiday break in 1959, Jackson had to prepare for a speech, but the “colored” library didn’t have enough books to do so, so a librarian sent him to the white library. Police were called. Books weren’t acquired. Jackson cried at the injustice. Jackson would later transfer to North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College the following year, playing football and participating in student government.

In the summer of 1960, Jackson participated in a sit-in at the whites-only Greenville County Public Library and was subsequently arrested as one of the Greenville Eight for disorderly conduct. “They called us ignorant, but arrested us for trying to use the library,” Jackson said of the irony in an N’Digo interview. The library became integrated as a result of public demonstrations by the Black community.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, center, speaks to church leaders after the Greenville County Council voted to allow county employees to choose the Martin Luther King holiday as a paid day off, April 1, 2003, in his birthplace of Greenville, S.C. (Mary Ann Chastain/AP)

Long Branch Baptist Church Rev. Sean Dogan came out of the pulpit Sunday smiling remembering how as a youth of 8 years old, he heard Jackson speak at a Pleasant Valley church during his 1984 presidential campaign. When Dogan became the pastor at Long Branch in the late 90s, Jackson would return home to visit his mother and sometimes come to the sanctuary, sit in the back, and listen.

His presence was known, yet it was the seeds Rev. Jackson planted in 2000 that are still nurturing the futures of children. Dogan said Rev. Jackson provided the initial seed money for college scholarships for children of the congregation.

“What we have as a scholarship fund actually started with Rev. Jackson, with the gift of $5,000 that he gave towards our scholarship fund,” Dogan said. The scholarship fund has since grown and now supports college freshmen through their junior year, each year, with a monthly stipend. “It’s those seeds that he planted here at his home base that has now sprouted into something wonderful,” Dogan added.

Rev. Jackson’s work throughout his life will be honored today as people come out to pay their respects in South Carolina . The Jackson family and members of the South Carolina General Assembly requested Rev. Jackson lie at the South Carolina State House, 1100 Gervais Street, in Columbia on Monday from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. A memorial tribute will follow at Brookland Baptist Church, 1066 Sunset Boulevard, West Columbia, South Carolina from 4 to 6 p.m. Both events are open to the public.

Details of the day will be updated here.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/03/02/south-carolina-rev-jesse-jackson-sr/