Share and Follow
COLUMBIA, S.C. (WBTW) – South Carolina will pay tribute to the late Rev. Jesse Jackson by having his body lie in state at the Capitol building next week, as confirmed by officials on Monday.
The influential civil rights figure, who hailed from Greenville, passed away on February 17 at age 84, following a struggle with a rare neurological condition impacting his speech and mobility.
In tribute, Governor Henry McMaster ordered that flags at the State House be flown at half-staff from sunrise to sunset on March 2, the day of Jackson’s commemoration.
Organizational efforts for the memorial are being managed by the state’s Department of Administration in collaboration with Jackson’s family.
Meanwhile, a request for Jackson to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol was turned down by House Speaker Mike Johnson over the weekend.
The Speaker considered past precedent mostly reserving the practice for former presidents and select former government officials and military honorees. Requests for conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and former Vice President Dick Cheney to lie in the Capitol were also recently denied.
The last person to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda was former President Jimmy Carter, who died Dec. 29, 2024 at age 100.
Jackson will lie in repose this week at the Chicago headquarters of his Rainbow PUSH Coalition. His body will then travel to South Carolina and Washington, D.C., for more celebrations of his life. A public service will be held in Chicago at House of Hope, a 10,000-seat church, on March 6, followed by private homegoing services the next day at Rainbow PUSH, which will be livestreamed.
Jackson was born in 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, in a tiny house on Haynie Street just outside of downtown. A portion of the street will be named in his honor.
He was the quarterback at segregated Sterling High School, where he led seven other Black classmates into the whites only public library in Greenville in 1960 where they sat and read books and magazines until they were arrested.
Jackson rose to prominence six decades ago as a protégé of King, joining the voting rights march King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. King later dispatched Jackson to Chicago to launch Operation Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference effort to pressure companies to hire Black workers. Jackson was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was killed.
Jackson went on to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988.
He continued to be active in his home state, pushing in 2003 for Greenville County to honor King by matching the federal holiday in his honor and in 2015 by advocating for removing the Confederate flag from South Carolina State House grounds after nine Black worshipers were killed in a racist shooting at a Charleston church.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.