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.

WASHINGTON — Tributes poured in across the country for the revered civil rights figure the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., who died Tuesday morning at 84.

The two-time Democratic presidential hopeful and Greenville, South Carolina, native died peacefully, surrounded by his kin, according to his family. 

Jackson, who was active in the civil rights movement as a college student, worked alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a young adult before King’s 1968 assassination.

Leading his own political movement, Jackson became known for his populist message, charismatic delivery and organizing prowess that elevated the role and influence of Black political leaders and helped shape the modern Democratic Party.

“Our father was a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” Jackson’s family said in a statement. 

“We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family,” his family added. “His unwavering belief in justice, equality, and love uplifted millions, and we ask you to honor his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by.”

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, ordered flags to fly at half-staff Tuesday in Jackson’s honor in the state where he lived and worked for many years.

The family statement did not list a cause of death. Jackson was diagnosed in 2013 with Parkinson’s disease. His diagnosis was updated last year to progressive supranuclear palsy, according to a November statement from the Rainbow PUSH Coalition that Jackson founded.

Tributes from Obama, Trump and Biden

Former President Barack Obama, the first Black president, and his wife, Michelle Obama, said Jackson’s runs for the presidency “laid the foundation” for Barack Obama’s successful 2008 campaign. And Chicago native Michelle Obama’s “first glimpse of political organizing” was at the Jacksons’ kitchen table, they said.

“From organizing boycotts and sit-ins, to registering millions of voters, to advocating for freedom and democracy around the world, he was relentless in his belief that we are all children of God, deserving of dignity and respect,” they wrote. “Reverend Jackson also created opportunities for generations of African Americans and inspired countless more, including us.”

President Donald Trump paid tribute, dubbing Jackson “a force of nature like few others before him” and a “good man, with lots of personality, grit, and ‘street smarts,’” in a social media post Tuesday.  

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the highest-ranking Black member of Congress, honored Jackson as a “legendary voice for the voiceless, powerful civil rights champion and trailblazer extraordinaire,” in a social media post. 

“For decades, while laboring in the vineyards of the community, he inspired us to keep hope alive in the struggle for liberty and justice for all,” the New York Democrat said.

Jeffries expressed gratitude for Jackson’s “incredible service” to the country and “profound sacrifice as the people’s champion.” 

Former President Joe Biden called Jackson “a man of God and of the people. Determined and tenacious. Unafraid of the work to redeem the soul of our Nation.” 

South Carolina legacy

U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat and longtime friend of Jackson, said the civil rights leader lived a life “defying odds,” in a statement Tuesday.  

“Reverend Jackson showed us that if we all work together – we can bend the arc of the moral universe and change history,” Clyburn said while also pointing to Jackson’s impact on “the nation, Black Americans, and movements to encourage civic participation around the world.” 

U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican who is the party’s highest-ranking Black elected official, honored Jackson’s legacy as a leader and role model.

“I don’t have to agree with someone politically to deeply respect the role Jesse Jackson, a South Carolina native, played in uplifting Black voices and inspiring young folks to believe their voices mattered,” Scott wrote on social media. “Those that empower people to stand taller always leave a lasting mark. Rest in peace.”

Jackson’s legacy will live on in the next generation, South Carolina state Sen. Deon Tedder said during a news conference Tuesday. 

“The future generation, they’re picking up that torch, they’re picking up that mantle,” said Tedder, a Democrat, gesturing to students from the state’s historically Black colleges and universities. “The baton has been passed, and now what you see is the future.”

South Carolina state Rep. Hamilton Grant recalled seeing Jackson at the July 9, 2015, signing ceremony of the law that removed the Confederate flag from Statehouse grounds entirely. The flag was taken down the next day, 15 years after it came off the Statehouse dome in a compromise Jackson opposed. 

“For him, being from South Carolina, to see that moment, and me being there in close proximity with him, meant the world to me,” Grant told the South Carolina Daily Gazette. He said Jackson paved the way for Black leaders like him and helped instill in him pride in his identity.

The South Carolina House and Senate held moments of silence in Jackson’s honor Tuesday. 

“There are so many little boys and little girls in South Carolina who can look in the mirror now and say, ‘I am somebody!’ because of this native son,” state Sen. Karl Allen, a Democrat, said.

Shaping Democratic politics

Jackson leaves behind a legacy of political and social justice work that spanned decades. 

He founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a national social justice organization whose name evoked Jackson’s multiracial voter base and the theme of his 1984 Democratic National Convention speech. That organization was formed by a merger between Operation PUSH, which Jackson founded in 1971, and the Rainbow Coalition.

In his 1988 bid for the presidency, Jackson based his campaign in Iowa prior to that state’s presidential caucuses and made the official announcement of his candidacy at a farm in Greenfield on Oct. 10, 1987. 

He finished in fourth place in the caucuses but went on to briefly become the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination by winning a coalition of Black and Latino voters and white liberals, though he ultimately came in second in delegates to Michael Dukakis. 

Similar blocs propelled Obama to victory two decades later and continue to form national Democrats’ base.

Two of Jackson’s sons, Jesse Jackson Jr. and Jonathan Jackson, would represent Illinois in the U.S. House. Jonathan Jackson remains in office after first winning election in 2022.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist from Vermont who endorsed Jackson’s 1988 campaign, said in a Tuesday statement Jackson had been a friend and ally for nearly 40 years and credited Jackson with founding modern progressivism.

“His creation of the Rainbow Coalition, a revolutionary idea at the time, that developed a grassroots movement of working people — Black, white, Latino, Asian-American, Native-American, gay and straight — laid the foundation for the modern progressive movement which is continuing to fight for his vision of economic, racial, social and environmental justice,” Sanders wrote. “Jackson has had a profound impact upon our country. His politics of togetherness and solidarity should guide us going forward.”

‘Equal justice is not inevitable’

Georgia U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat and a Baptist pastor, recalled the influence Jackson’s presidential runs had on a young Warnock growing up in public housing.

“With an eloquence and rhythmic rhetoric all his own, Jesse Jackson reminded America that equal justice is not inevitable,” he said. “It requires vigilance and commitment, and for freedom fighters, sacrifice. His ministry was poetry and spiritual power in the public square. He advanced King’s dream and bent the arc of history closer to justice.”

Jaime Harrison, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said Jackson’s 1988 run, which culminated with a speech at the party convention that lauded the United States’ multiracial identity, inspired him.

As “a poor Black kid from South Carolina,” Harrison said he was drawn to Jackson’s command of the convention hall after accumulating more than 1,000 delegates.

“He did not win the nomination,” Harrison wrote. “But he won our imagination.”

Adrian Ashford contributed to this report.