What shall it be to a state, that he opens his gates upon him with open arms, when him once he had closed the gates of her life? Thousands of people in Columbia assembled into a long, slow moving line in front of the Statehouse of South Carolina to say their goodbyes to the Rev. Jesse Jackson which was lying in state. The Greenville native and one of the main participants of the current Civil Rights Movement, Jackson died on Feb. 17 at the age of 84. His casket with the American flag on it came to pay another tribute of a lying-in-state following previous public services in Chicago.
The irony of that reincarnation falls most crucially in the specifics of the first activism of Jackson. Jackson and a small group of fellow students entered a whites-only branch of the library in Greenville in 1960 when Jackson was a teenager, sat down and read until he was arrested which helped to move the local system towards integration. That time is generally considered as the catalyst which helped to determine the path of his career in the public, both in organizing and preaching as well as in constructing national coalitions and generating moral urgency into civic pressure.
Ceremony and ordinary mourning were simultaneously present on the day of the Statehouse observances. Allen University choir was singing when the casket of Jackson was being brought in and the family members were weeping. Leaders elected in his home area were there to signify what his work was to Greenville and to the state. State Rep. Chandra Dillard spoke of the presence of Jackson in terms which were less part of politics than memory: You could always know when he was in the room, she said. One day he could be vocal and arrogant and the next day he could be gentle and charming.
Individuals in the line came with their own time schedules. A retired Air Force officer Aaron Brown, who drove to Georgia, stated that the example of Jackson assisted him in making the decision to serve. Rep. Jim Clyburn of the U.S. remembered his origins with Jackson as lifelong friends and over years of working together and living together in the community.
The realm of public life of Jackson was much more than a statehouse rotunda, but South Carolina was always a frequent point of reference. He continued to participate in civic discussions of the state as an adult, even demanding that Greenville County should fully adopt the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and should have the Confederate flag removed off Statehouse grounds. Later in his life, he also experienced progressive supranuclear palsy which is a rare neurological disorder that impaired mobility and speech.
Nonetheless, the legacy of Jackson is not necessarily remembered as a particular collection of achievements but rather as a way of leadership: coalition, domination of national issues to local problems, and demand that the right to partake in American life was to be accompanied by access: economic, civic, and cultural. He also established the Operation PUSH in the 1970s and, subsequently, contributed to the formation of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, which was associated with voter registration, economic programs, and campaigns against corporate responsibility. He was visible on a national scale, having run two presidential campaigns, and decades as a leading figure at the nexus of faith, organizing and public policy.
The rituals of the day in South Carolina provided an easy continuum: a man who used to be denied a library was given a statue in the same building with the symbolic state authority. To most who came to form the line the juncture was a bare, simple, personal one one last look at sealing up the book which had been opened in segregated Greenville and continued all the years of her life in a struggle of the people.
