The Rev. Jesse Jackson comes home, to the South Carolina people that molded the man Chicago knew

GREENVILLE, S.C. — Back in 1960, the story goes, a teenaged Jesse Jackson entered the whites-only branch of his hometown library with seven comrades-in-arms who’d be christened the Greenville Eight after getting arrested for their civil disobedience.

It was the first of the civil rights icon’s many arrests, at 19, as part of the NAACP’s youth council at the end of his freshman year at the flagship University of Illinois campus.

But the young people who sat down in the well-appointed white library in July 1960 got up and left when staffers shut off the lights. They returned to their advisor, the Rev. James S. Hall, at the Springfield Baptist Church. He promptly sent them back.

“They said to me, ‘They were going to put us in jail’,” recalls Hall, now 93. “I said, ‘That's what I sent you there for.”

For most of his 84 years, the Rev. Jackson powered through so many high places, organizing boycotts, freeing hostages and launching two presidential bids, that it begs remembering he wasn’t born a giant. And despite living most of his life in Chicago, that is not where his story began.

The son of a teenaged mother, Jackson died Feb. 17 and lay in honor on Monday in the Capitol rotunda of the state he thought of as home and returned to throughout the rest of his life.

Before he landed in Chicago in his 20s to establish his own power, starting with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., activism was something Jackson had to learn from those around him, from mentors and teachers who nurtured and bolstered him and his classmates from Sterling High School, once an institution for Black Greenville.

“We had wonderful, underscore, wonderful teachers who believed in you,” says Dorris Wright, another of the Greenville Eight, who went on to make her own mark in the Civil Rights Movement as part of incidents that led to two U.S. Supreme Court rulings. “One English teacher had a Ph.D., “and we asked, ‘Why are you here?’ And she said, ‘this is where I'm needed.”

“You didn't have a lot to distract you growing up in the segregated South,” Wright says. “But most of our activities were centered around high school.

“You knew you were loved, both at home and in school. So I mean, it was just something that it's not verbal, I would say it's visceral. It was something that you felt and the teachers always encouraged you to continue to go on.”

Then Greenville’s young people like Wright and Jackson began sitting in at lunch counters and parks. Their youth let them draw attention that would have cost their parents their jobs.

Jackson signed Wright’s yearbook in June 1959, with the inscription, “Dear Dorris you possess the ability of a wonderful leader. Use it wisely. A pal always, Jesse.” He’d later write the prologue to her 2022 book, “The (W)right Thing: My Life in the Civil Rights Movement.”

“It’s so interesting, he would say, ‘You possess the ability of a wonderful leader,” she says. “And he turned out to be that leader.”

‘Jesse, promise me you’ll be somebody’

Jackson was born to a single young mom, “and his biological father, who lived just down the street, I guess you would say, really never gave him the time of the day,” recalls James Felder, who was 14 when he befriended a 12-year-old Jackson. “But his stepfather still stood in and Jesse got his moorings, I guess you would say, from his stepfather, whose name was [Charles] Jackson.”

Jackson, who excelled at sports, had other mentors, too.

“His coach — he always talked about Coach [Joseph D.] Mathis — that was the man in his life, and there were a couple others,” says Felder, one of the first Black people elected to the South Carolina legislature. Jackson “as they say, he had a lot of spunk, and they saw something in him. So they kept encouraging him.”

Jackson’s mother, Helen Burns Jackson, eventually became a cosmetologist, so friends remember young Jesse Jackson spending time with her mother, Matilda Burns, who adored him.

In his 1986 autobiography “Up with Hope,” Jesse Jackson wrote that his grandmother never learned to read herself, but appreciated books and education, and wanted more for her grandson. “When God made you, he did his best work,” she had once said. “Jesse, promise me you’ll be somebody.”

On Monday, South Carolina sent Jackson off with high honors, beneath the dome of its copper-domed statehouse. Draped in a flag, Jackson’s casket processed around the Capitol on a horse-drawn carriage, his children following on foot. The state police who carried the casket wore ceremonial dress; on the steps outside, a choir sang a traditional Chicago funeral hymn, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.”

Sprays of flowers announced “Son of South Carolina.” Meanwhile, lines of people waited for hours for the public’s turn to walk slowly past his casket.

Greenville’s state representative Chandra Dillard — who says she and Jackson called each other “Greenville homeboys”— thanked his children for “bringing their dad back to South Carolina.”

Such a grand homecoming for a Black man was unthinkable in Jackson's earliest days.

Greenville’s brand of racism stood out in the Jim Crow South. As Black people pushed to integrate the city pool, news accounts reported at the time, the city council voted to convert it into a marine park, complete with sea lions, rather than let Black children swim there.

A green marker now announces the bumpy block of Haynie Street as “Reverend Jesse L. Jackson Sr. Street.” But nothing identifies the little white-sided house as the one where Jackson was born, to a teenaged mother who couldn’t afford a hospital stay.

That house wouldn’t have an indoor toilet for more than a decade after his birth, says Freddie Clinkscales, 84, whose family bought the home a little before she started at Sterling High School, graduating with Jackson in 1959.

“When we moved there we had to go outside and use the bathroom,” she says. “And my parents added on two more rooms and a bathroom to be on the inside of the house.”

It’s still barely 1,200 square feet, obviously one of the three oldest houses on the block amid a slew of new construction booming in Greenville.

Connected to Greenville for life

Jackson’s Greenville friends marveled at how he made the time to stay in touch.

The Rev. Hall was just 25 when he was sent to pastor Greenville’s large Black church, and he and his family hosted the youth council. The family’s commitment to the NAACP also included taking in baseball legend Jackie Robinson when Greenville hotels refused him service, and their help getting Robinson back to the airport led to an effort to desegregate airport waiting rooms.

“It was then that we decided that we would march on the airport, and Jesse Jackson was a part of that. And he then became involved in the movement of the young people when they were sitting in at lunch counters and in the library,” Hall recalls.

“We just kept the fact going because of what my father taught me, and what I believed and what I read in the Bible about what God intended for us to be and not what the racist country intended to make us: What I am right now, Baptist preacher, but one who is not afraid.”

Their friendship continued after the Halls moved to Philadelphia, and years later, between his 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, Jackson would officiate the wedding of Hall’s daughter.

On the Greenville Eight’s 40th anniversary, Jackson also brought some of them to Chicago for a celebration. Wright was among them, and on Monday, she dressed up and waited her turn in the line outside the Capitol to say goodbye to her friend.

“It was how he made you feel,” Wright says. “And then when he coined the phrase, ‘I am somebody,’ I think it was carrying on what he had felt was who he was. He was somebody and he was loved.”

Contributing: Somer Van Benton