Long before the Rev. Jesse Jackson cemented his legacy as a civil-rights leader in struggles across the country and the world, he was a young boy growing up in Greenville, S.C., in an extremely segregated and poor part of the South that would shape his understanding of race in America.
It was a place that Mr. Jackson often invoked in speeches. At the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, he described how he was born “in a three-room house, bathroom in the backyard, slop jar by the bed, no hot and cold running water.”
He was “born in the slum,” he told the audience, “but the slum was not born in me.”
On Tuesday, residents in Greenville reflected on those humble beginnings as they learned of Mr. Jackson’s death at the age of 84.
“He is our son,” said Davida Mathis, a lawyer and activist whose father coached Mr. Jackson in football at Sterling High School. “He was our superstar.”
As he grew older, Mr. Jackson turned into a studious, strong and extremely confident “super boy,” neighbors said, someone who ignored coaches’ drawn-up plays as quarterback, who ran errands for neighbors on his bike, and who wrote in yearbooks that he would one day be president — never mind that in the 1950s, it was illegal for him to even sit in the front of a bus.
Greenville was also the place that kick-started his involvement in civil rights. In the summer of 1960, when Mr. Jackson was not yet 20 years old, he helped lead a march with seven other Black students at the Greenville public library that had denied him access.
And in 2002, when he learned that Greenville County did not acknowledge Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday, he flew there every few weeks to petition the local government to begin honoring it. When that didn’t work, he helped organize a march. And after that, he and his allies backed Republican primary candidates who promised to vote for the holiday. Those candidates won, and the county now closes for business on that day.
“He’s one of ours who’s done good, and I think that gets overlooked, especially in conversations about the South and activism,” said Avery Allen, a Greenville native who knew Mr. Jackson her entire life.
Ken Gibson, a member of the Greenville City Council who knew Mr. Jackson well, described him on Tuesday as “a phenomenal individual.”
“He had the most fantastic presence, and he just filled a room,” said Mr. Gibson, whose parents were civil-rights activists with the N.A.A.C.P. in the early 1960s.
Still, residents say that Greenville’s celebration of Mr. Jackson feels more muted than in other cities in the South that have birthed titans of the Civil Rights era.
In Birmingham, Ala., for example, the city’s airport is named after Fred Shuttlesworth, a Black leader who survived beatings and bombings. At North Carolina A&T University — which Mr. Jackson attended — there is a monument dedicated to the four students who sat down at the segregated lunch counter of the Woolworth’s store.
But in Greenville, S.C., there is no major street, historical marker or monument dedicated to Mr. Jackson, residents noted. Several years ago, there was an effort to preserve his childhood home on Haynie Street as a historical site. But the project fizzled after the councilwoman who led the effort died in 2016.
“The fact that Jesse Jackson brings recognition to Greenville and to South Carolina, you would think that they would take advantage of that legacy to use it for tourism,” said Abel A. Bartley, a professor of African America and Civil Rights history at Clemson University. “The things he did to move our country and our nation forward on civil rights deserves some kind of recognition. And his hometown in particular should lead the way.”
Some in Greenville were more interested on Tuesday in reminiscing about quieter, more intimate memories. They remembered Mr. Jackson’s trips back home when he was already an established political figure, how he would ask to go to S & S Cafeteria on Pleasantburg Drive to order his favorite banana cream pie.
And they recalled the rhyme and riddle game he would play with his mother, Helen Burns, even in the months before her death in 2015. He would stand by her bedside at the hospital, say a random phrase like “big son went down to the river,” and she would respond with a sentence that rhymed and matched thematically.
Freddie Jean Clinkscales, 84, who went to high school with Mr. Jackson, looked up at the house on Haynie Street on Tuesday. She thought of the young man who “was always trying to help everybody,” she said, and who decades later fought to make sure she could sit wherever she wanted to.
It had felt so belittling in her youth to step onto an empty bus and be forced to hold herself steady with a pole in the back.
If it had not been for people like Mr. Jackson, she said, “we’d still be hanging onto that pole.”
Eduardo Medina is a Times reporter covering the South. An Alabama native, he is now based in Durham, N.C.
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