COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. never stopped fighting for civil rights around the world. This includes South Carolina, the state where he was born and raised, and where he first experienced state-sanctioned racial discrimination.
Jackson's body lay in state Monday inside the South Carolina Capitol. It started with a rousing version of the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” that reverberated through the Statehouse
— a building that was partially destroyed in 1865 during the Civil War, which South Carolina started to keep slavery.
Before the doors opened to the public, politicians and other guests remembered a man who grew up in segregated Greenville and, in 1960, led seven Black high school students into the whites-only library branch. They sat down, quietly read books and magazines, and were arrested. And Jackson's civil rights career began.
“Because of his efforts, I can sit where I am today,” said Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, who has served 33 years in Congress and first met Jackson when they were on rival high school sports teams in segregated South Carolina. They forged a lifelong friendship through the civil rights struggle.
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.
His casket, draped in an American flag, arrived at the South Carolina Statehouse on a horse-drawn caisson on a chilly, cloudy morning. A special white-gloved Highway Patrol honor guard escorted Jackson inside the Statehouse and to the second floor, where well over 100 people packed under the rotunda for a ceremony before the public was invited in to pay their respects. Behind Jackson's casket, with his back turned, was a statue of former U.S. Vice President John C. Calhoun, a zealous defender of slavery.
When the Statehouse doors opened to the public, a line seven blocks long was waiting. People walked up to the second floor and were given a moment to pray or take a picture or a selfie before a trooper in a dress uniform politely asked them to keep moving.
The South Carolina services are part of two weeks of events. It began with Jackson’s body lying in repose last week at 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 Rainbow PUSH headquarters. Plans for a service in Washington, D.C., to honor him have been postponed until a later date.
Nationally and internationally, Jackson advocated for the poor and underrepresented for voting rights, job opportunities, education and health care. He scored diplomatic victories with world leaders.
Through 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 was the Civil Rights Movement’s torchbearer after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and would run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988.
Jackson was present in 2015 when the South Carolina House voted to finally remove the Confederate flag from the Capitol grounds. Several were placed there during the 1960s in opposition to the federal government's push for integration.
South Carolina’s longest-serving legislator found Jackson in the celebration. Democratic Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter said he pulled her aside.
“It’s great to take down the Confederate flag. But what about the Confederate agenda,” Cobb-Hunter recalled him saying. “What I want people to remember is there is still much work to do.”
Jackson also pushed in 2003 for Greenville County to honor King by matching the federal holiday in his honor.
It's not just Black South Carolinians who owe Jackson a debt of gratitude. Anyone who enjoys the rewards of a rapidly growing state, thanks in part to manufacturers like luxury carmaker BMW and airplane maker Boeing locating here, owes him, Greenville Mayor Knox White said.
“Can you imagine a BMW or a Boeing would locate in a segregated South Carolina? Of course not,” White said. “He freed us all.”
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 that led to the removal of the Confederate flag from Statehouse grounds.
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Associated Press writer Sophia Tareen in Chicago contributed to this report.
