Jesse Jackson, civil rights titan and South Carolina native has died at 84
South Carolina native and long time civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson died. He was 84.
Jackson’s daughter, Santita Jackson, confirmed that her father died Tuesday at home in Chicago, surrounded by family, the Associated Press reported.
Jackson was born in Greenville in 1941. His mother, Jesse Louis Burns, was 16 years old at the time; his father Noah Luis Robinson was married and lived next door. A year later, Jackson’s mother married Charles Henry Jackson, a post office maintenance worker, who later adopted Jesse, according to Biography.com. Jackson grew up during the Jim Crow era in segregated Greenville.
He attended Sterling High School, one of two public schools for Black students in Greenville County, and was a football standout. He worked as a waiter in Greenville‘s upscale Poinsett Hotel, then owned by the Jack Tar Hotel chain, where legend has it he spit in the food of white customers who mistreated the wait staff.
In 1959, Jackson attended the University of Illinois on a football scholarship, but transferred out of the mostly white school to the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina in Greensboro, where he began involvement in local civil rights demonstrations, according to Biography.com.
In July 1960, Jackson was one of eight Black students to stage a sit-in at the whites-only Greenville County Public Library. Known as the Greenville Eight, they were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after refusing requests to leave. The group was assembled after Jackson, home from college, needed a book for a research project that the library for Blacks did not have. He went to the white library and was denied the opportunity to check it out.
The city-owned library system closed the Black and white branches, and the city was sued.
That also spurred sit-ins at Woolworth, Kress and other stores with lunch counters.
Greenville’s libraries were eventually desegregated and charges against Jackson and the other members of the Greenville Eight were dropped, according to American Libraries Magazine.
Jackson took part in the 1965 voting rights march to Selma, Alabama, where Martin Luther King Jr. offered him a job with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Jackson is credited with organizing Black residents of Chicago to boycott grocery stores and bakeries in a fight for better wages, according to “South Carolina Encyclopedia.”
“It should not be lost on any of us the impact that Reverend Jackson has had on the nation, Black Americans, and movements to encourage civic participation around the world,” said U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, lone Democratic member of South Carolina’s federal delegation. His vision is his legacy, and his teachings continue to inspire me as I continue the pursuit of justice and equality.
Jackson was with Martin Luther King Jr. when King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. Jackson went on to found the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a progressive group dedicated to fighting for social change.
In 1984 and 1988, Jackson sought the nation’s highest office, becoming the second Black person to mount a national campaign for president. In 1984, he spoke during the Democratic National Convention, the year Walter Mondale was nominated to run against President Ronald Reagan.
During the speech he made reference to his time in Greenville.
“When I was a child growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, the Reverend Sample used to preach ever so often a sermon relating to Jesus, and he said, ‘If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me.’ I didn’t quite understand what he meant as a child growing up, but I understand a little better now. If you raise up truth, it is magnetic. It has a way of drawing people.”
In his 1988 speech at the DNC, Jackson spoke about being born in a house, rather than a hospital, because his mother did not have insurance. The house did not have running water, and the wallpaper served not for decoration, but as a windbreaker.
On Thanksgiving Day, his family had to wait to eat because his mother was preparing dinner for another family. “Around 6 o’clock she would get off the Alta Vista bus, and we would bring up the leftovers and eat our turkey — leftovers, the carcass, the cranberries — around 8 o’clock at night,” Jackson said in the speech.
“I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me,” Jackson said, speaking directly to people with similar backgrounds. “And it wasn’t born in you, and you can make it.”
He also was appointed a special envoy to Africa by President Bill Clinton.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said he would order the flags to half staff over the State House in honor of Jackson at the appropriate time.
“A native son of South Carolina, and an icon of the civil rights movement, the Reverend Jesse Jackson was a prominent voice in our nation’s political and cultural dialogue. Peggy and I are saddened to learn of his passing,” McMaster posted on social media.
Jackson, who also had Parkinson’s disease, remained active in politics, including weighing in on South Carolina politics.
In October 2020, Jackson participated in a virtual town hall event with then U.S. Democratic Senate candidate Jaime Harrison, state Rep. Terry Alexander, D-Florence, and SC Democratic Party Faith Caucus Chairman Bishop John Wright focusing on faith, voting rights and civil rights.
“Today we lost a giant,” Harrison said on social media. “Rev. Jackson didn’t just run for President. He made it real. He widened the path. There would be no Ron Brown, no Donna Brazile, no Barack Obama, no Jaime Harrison as America came to know us — without Jesse Jackson first expanding what felt possible. He didn’t win the nomination. He changed the future.”
In the days leading up to the South Carolina Democratic Presidential Primary in February 2020, Jackson called for the Palmetto State, whose primary follows voting in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, to be first in the primary voting process.
“Iowa and New Hampshire amounts to a white primary in 2020,” Jackson said. “The South is not in the forefront, as it should have been.”
“We must make South Carolina be number one, not number four, in the process,” Jackson said of the state where a bulk of the Democratic electorate is Black. “We’re rural. We’re urban. We’re Black. We’re white.”
This story was originally published February 17, 2026 at 7:32 AM.
