Jesse Jackson’s Shoes Impossible to Fill
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
In the late autumn of Jim Crow, in a segregated town not far from where I write this, a boy learned which water fountains were his, where to sit on the bus, and how to turn humiliation into a vocation.
Jesse Louis Jackson was born Jesse Louis Burns, on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, to an 18-year-old high school student, Helen Burns, and a married neighbor more than a decade older. Eighty-four years later, after a life spent preaching, marching, running for president, brokering unlikely pardons and photo-ops, and insisting that American democracy expand to fit people who had been told, for generations, that it was not built for them, he died today, surrounded by family.
Greenville in the 1940s and 1950s was a place where the rules of race were enforced with a casual ferocity that Jackson would spend his public life naming and resisting. His mother, still a teenager when he was born, raised him in a house that sat in the shadow of white prosperity but outside its protections, and the circumstances of his birth—out of wedlock, the son of a man who belonged to another family—were used by other children as an instrument of shame. Jackson would later say that those taunts, and the knowledge that his very existence was considered irregular by the people who ran his town, helped fuel his determination to excel.
At Sterling High School, the all-Black school on Greenville’s West Side, he became the student-body president, a three-sport athlete, and a local star—a boy whose speed and ease on the football field made him a candidate for another sort of American story. He earned a scholarship to the University of Illinois, in Champaign, where he spent a year as a freshman quarterback before the gravitational pull of the South, and of the movement that was beginning to stir there, drew him back.
The symbolic moment in the Greenville portion of his biography came not on a field but at a library. On a trip home from Illinois, Jackson joined a group of Black students in a demonstration at the whites-only Greenville County public library, where they sat in silence, reading, until the police arrived.
“Some of my classmates and I, we were arrested trying to use a public library in Greenville, South Carolina,” he would recall decades later. The library sit-in eventually helped force the desegregation of the facility.
“We could not buy ice cream in the front door of the Howard Johnson.”
He transferred to North Carolina A&T State University, in Greensboro, on a football scholarship, and it was there, amid the aftershocks of the Woolworth’s lunch-counter sit-ins, that his activism found its structure. But the sensibility that animated his politics—the combination of religious cadence, small-town memory, and stubborn insistence on visibility—remained recognizably South Carolinian.
By the mid-1960s, Jackson was in Chicago, studying theology and working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization founded by Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1966, King asked him to help lead Operation Breadbasket, a campaign that used targeted boycotts and negotiations to pressure white-owned businesses into hiring and promoting Black workers. Jackson’s particular gift was not simply for confrontation but for choreography: he could turn a Saturday-morning rally into something that felt like both a worship service and a political convention, with hymns, slogans, and a running inventory of grievances and goals.
After King’s assassination, in 1968, Jackson became one of the most visible inheritors of the civil-rights pulpit, even as he clashed with some veterans of the movement over questions of style and strategy. In 1971, he founded Operation PUSH—People United to Save Humanity—in Chicago, and, years later, merged it with the National Rainbow Coalition to form Rainbow/PUSH, an organization that mixed boycotts, voter-registration drives, and a constant stream of press conferences into a kind of permanent campaign.
His two presidential runs, in 1984 and 1988, were widely treated, at first, as quixotic gestures—a test of how far a Black Baptist preacher from Greenville could travel in a party still governed, largely, by white ethnic machines and coastal liberals. Jackson turned them into something else: rolling town meetings for people who had not been asked, in such direct terms, to imagine themselves as central to national politics. He called his base a “rainbow coalition” of the poor and the working class—Black, Latino, white, Native, Asian, gay, straight, urban, rural—and insisted, with increasing success, that the Democratic Party change its rules to give that coalition more leverage.
He did not win the nomination either time. But in 1988 he finished second, ahead of Al Gore and other mainstream contenders, and his campaigns helped normalize the idea of a Black national candidate in a way that would prove essential, two decades later, to the launch of Barack Obama’s. The rhetorical habits that began in Greenville—in the call-and-response of Black churches, the formal poise of high-school assemblies, the improvisations of the football field—were now being tested on national debate stages and convention floors.
For all his years headquartered in Chicago, Jackson never fully stopped being a son of South Carolina. He came back regularly, to endorse local candidates, to eulogize old comrades, to march against the state’s reluctance to remove Confederate symbols from its public spaces. When the Confederate battle flag was finally taken down from the State House grounds, in 2015, it was in the wake of the massacre at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston—a horror that fused, in a single event, the religious and political energies that had animated his career. His South Carolina origin was not merely biographical color; it was an ongoing analytic frame.
Jackson often spoke about the paradoxes of the state—a place that had produced secession and Strom Thurmond, but also Septima Clark, Modjeska Simkins, and the students who led the Orangeburg Movement—and he treated his own trajectory, from the back of Greenville buses to the floor microphones of Democratic conventions, as an argument against regionally fatalistic thinking. If the boy who could not enter a public library by the front door could one day negotiate the release of hostages abroad or persuade a Fortune 500 C.E.O. to add Black members to a board, then the boundaries of the possible were not where white South Carolina had drawn them.
In 2017, Jackson announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a disclosure that recast some of his public hesitations and physical tremors in a new light. He continued to appear at demonstrations, to hold Rainbow/PUSH events, and to offer commentary on elections and crises, but the visible strain was harder to miss. In 2023, he stepped down as president of Rainbow/PUSH, handing formal leadership of the organization to a younger generation while retaining an almost totemic role as founder.
By early 2026, his health had deteriorated further, and his family, who had spent years trying to balance his instinct for public presence with the private realities of a degenerative disease, issued the statement that people who had grown up chanting his slogans had long feared. “Our father was a servant leader—not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” they wrote. “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family.”
The phrase “servant leader,” like many of the terms used to describe Jackson, is both an honorific and a description of the working conditions of the Black Southern clergy from which he came. A pastor in that tradition is expected to preside over Sunday services and Wednesday-night Bible study, but also to intervene in landlord disputes, bail hearings, zoning fights, and presidential campaigns. Jackson did all of that, and more, often in the same day.
It is tempting, in taking measure of his life, to settle on the most visible achievements: the marches with King; the Operation Breadbasket boycotts; the presidential campaigns that brought millions of first-time Black voters into the process; the Rainbow Coalition’s insistence that farmworkers, urban tenants, Appalachians, and gay activists had overlapping grievances. But the through line, especially if one keeps South Carolina in view, is an argument about legitimacy.
From Greenville’s segregated buses to Chicago’s corporate boardrooms, Jackson’s work involved telling people who had been treated as marginal that their complaints were not only valid but central to the health of the republic. When he stood on a convention stage and led a televised call-and-response, or walked into a union hall in the rural South to urge a strike vote, or returned to Columbia to denounce a flag, he was extending a small-town practice—speaking from the pulpit to a congregation that knows your childhood gossip—to a nation that preferred, most days, to think of its injustices as either resolved or elsewhere.
Jackson could be grandiose, self-dramatizing, thin-skinned; his career was marked by feuds and missteps that his critics catalogued with relish. But in the end, the boy from Greenville who could not borrow a book from his own library until he was arrested trying, helped rewrite the shelves on which American political possibility is arranged. He came from a state that once defined itself by whom it would exclude, and spent his life insisting, with a drawl and a preacher’s timing, that the circle be drawn wider—that the back of the bus, the balcony of the theater, the separate fountain, and the locked library door were not just Southern artifacts but national obligations to undo.
