Editor’s note: This article has been updated following the day’s ceremonies. 

COLUMBIA — Thousands of mourners came to South Carolina’s capital Monday to say “thank you” to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the iconic civil rights figure whose activism helped change a nation.

Jackson died Feb. 17 at his home in Chicago at age 84. Though never an elected official himself, he inspired generations of Americans through his historic 1984 and 1988 campaigns for president. Two of his sons became congressmen: former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. and U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson of Illinois.

But it was at a segregated library in Greenville in 1960, while as a college student home from summer break, that their father’s leadership in the Civil Rights Movement began.

Both inside the Statehouse and later at a church ceremony, the audience declared “I am somebody” — the iconic phrase Jackson used to encourage and empower youth, whether with children on Sesame Street or to open a music festival in a Los Angeles coliseum.

“From the streets of South Carolina to the global stage, he carried a message rooted in faith and committed to expanding opportunity for all,” reads the program for a Statehouse ceremony “welcoming home a son of South Carolina.”

The tribute in his home state began with a mile-long procession of his casket on a horse-drawn wagon from Leevy’s Funeral Home to the Statehouse. On top of the dome the flags flew at half-mast in his honor from sunrise to sunset. His closed casket, draped with an American flag, was brought into the Statehouse shortly before 10 a.m.

By then, people had already been standing in line for nearly two hours.

They included Camden residents Shirley Stanley Gorham, 79, and Mary Stanley, 78, who attended the 1963 March on Washington, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made his “I Have a Dream” speech. Jackson, also in the crowd, later marched alongside King and witnessed his 1968 assassination in Memphis.

Gorham’s daughter, Theresa Allen, said the voices of King and Jackson gave her hope and a belief in equality.

She came to the Statehouse to give him one last “ginormous ‘thank you’ for his service,” Allen, also of Camden, told the SC Daily Gazette. “Being here today is also saying to him, although you earned your wings, we’re still here to be that voice for you.”

Gentarra Williams, 30, of Columbia, watched the procession with her mother and 1-year-old nephew Jordan.

“We get to witness history,” Williams said. “I want my nephew to see a history book and see this picture and say, ‘Everybody, I was there. I saw it.’”

Jackson’s stop at the Statehouse was a “high and unusual honor,” said his eldest daughter, Santita Jackson.

He’s among only a dozen or so people to lie in honor in the Statehouse and likely the first who was not an elected official.

Santita Jackson thanked Gov. Henry McMaster for the honor. The Republican governor approved the family’s request after the office of U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson denied a similar request that Jackson lie in state beneath the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. McMaster did not attend the morning ceremony but later stopped by the casket to pay his respects.

Monday’s events are part of a nationwide opportunity for people to say goodbye to Jackson, who learned directly from King before mentoring others and launching the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in Chicago that helped create the modern Democratic Party.

Celebrations of his life are also scheduled in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

It’s more fitting that Jackson lie in state in South Carolina anyway, said Jesse Jackson Jr.

“Our father was a South Carolina native. He began his fight for civil rights here. He brought meaningful change back to benefit his home state,” he said.

‘I am somebody’

Ahead of the doors opening to the public around noon, more than 100 people gathered inside the Statehouse to celebrate “a life well-lived and a job well-done,” said Rep. Jermaine Johnson, a Hopkins Democrat who’s running for governor.

Johnson, who emceed the hour and-a-half ceremony, was among scores of Black politicians, businessmen and activists who credited Jackson with paving the way for their successes.

Underscoring Jackson’s outsized impact was the celebrity-attendance at the invitation-only ceremony.

They included U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn; former U.S. Rep. Andrew Young of Georgia, a close confidante of King during the Civil Rights Movement; and University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley. Greg Mathis, of TV fame for the show “Judge Mathis,” credited Jackson with telling him to take his TV opportunity.

Legislators past and present attending both events included former Rep. James Felder. In 1970, he, I.S. Leevy Johnson and the late Herbert Fielding made history as the first Black South Carolinians elected to the House since 1902.

Felder said he first met Jackson when their schools took a field trip to the Statehouse. As Black students, however, they had to stay outside.

“He stood in the force of history and changed its course,” Felder said.

Clyburn said he too first met Jackson in high school. The two played for rival schools in football and basketball.

Jackson was his school’s starting quarterback, while Clyburn was “a prolific benchwarmer,” he said.

But Clyburn befriended Jackson’s mother, who supported Clyburn’s political career from the get-go. At her urging, Clyburn and Jackson became friends, and eventually their families grew so close that their children became friends, too.

“This is a friendship that spans generations,” Clyburn said.

State Rep. Chandra Dillard, a Greenville Democrat, and Greenville Mayor Knox White talked about Jackson’s work in his hometown.

That included organizing a July 1960 sit-in at the then-segregated Greenville County Public Library. The arrest of the Greenville Eight, as the group of students became known, prompted the library’s integration several months later.

Nearly half a century later, in 2005, Jackson led a march in his hometown to honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, as a way to highlight Greenville County’s status as the nation’s last to recognize MLK Day as a holiday for public workers. The County Council voted the next month to make MLK Day a holiday starting in January 2006.

That was six years after MLK Day became a permanent state holiday as part of a compromise that brought the Confederate flag off the Statehouse dome and put it on a 30-foot flagpole beside a monument along Columbia’s main thoroughfare. It was a compromise that neither Jackson nor the NAACP supported.

Jackson was back in the Statehouse in July 2015 to watch the Legislature vote to remove the battle flag from Statehouse grounds for good. He was among those who called for the flag to come down after an avowed white supremacist killed nine people at a historic Black church at the conclusion of a Wednesday night Bible study.

“He identified with the leftover, the lowdown and the mistreated,” Dillard said. “And he gave them a home by telling them that they were somebody.”

Because of him, “little boys like myself are able to say, ‘I am somebody,’” said Sen. Karl Allen, a Greenville Democrat and friend of Jackson’s.

Allen and politicians who followed his speech repeated Jackson’s mantra, declaring with the crowd: “I am somebody.”

Jackson often cited those words from a 1950s poem by an Atlanta pastor.

During a nearly three-hour memorial at Brookland Baptist in West Columbia, Jesse Jackson Jr. led the crowd of hundreds in a roaring call and response of the words he father often repeated and adapted.

“Respect me,” Jackson Jr. said, as the crowd chanted back each phrase. “Protect me. Never neglect me. I am somebody.”

Those inspirational phrases, as well as his father’s use of them, were more than political, he said.

“I believe dad’s contribution is psychological,” he said. “That ‘I am somebody’ restores the hope of a people who did not believe in themselves.”

Other civil rights leaders sharing their memories of Jackson included Cleveland Sellers, the former president of Voorhees College, a historically Black private school in Denmark.

Sellers worked as Jackson’s campaign coordinator for southeastern states. Their early activism required sacrifice, he said.

During the 1960s, peaceful protests in the South landed people in jail on trumped up charges, put them in harm’s way and often took them away from their families. But Jackson did it anyway, said Sellers, who also paid a price. He was the only person imprisoned for what became known as the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre, when state troopers killed three and injured 28 students who were protesting a whites-only bowling alley. Sellers, among the injured, received a one-year sentence for inciting a riot.

A formal apology from the state took 35 years, issued by Gov. Mark Sanford.

“It doesn’t look easy,” Sellers said. “It never was easy.”

Santita Jackson also talked about the family side of her father, who often brought her and her siblings with him on trips. He was daddy first, she said, before singing “The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power” with the church choir’s backing.

Jackson’s children urged the audience to continue working toward the dream of equality.

“We thank God for this king, this son of South Carolina, this great man who will live forever and ever and ever, as long as you call his name and as long as you don’t just remember him but resemble him,” said Santita Jackson.

“Do the work,” she finished.