When the Rev. Jesse Jackson was growing up in Greenville, S.C., his friends and neighbors knew that the tall, talkative child wouldn’t stay in the city all his life. His ambitions were too vast. After all, he had written in some of their yearbooks that he would be president some day.
But even as Mr. Jackson ventured around the country and world in his quest to expand civil rights, he would frequently return to Greenville. It was the place that shaped his understanding of racism, and where, as an 18-year-old in 1960, he led the Greenville Eight sit-in to desegregate the city’s library system. He returned to the area throughout his life for various marches and protests and to see his mother.
On Monday, in recognition of his importance to South Carolina, his body will lie in state in Columbia, the capital, in a ceremony that is expected to draw hundreds of visitors, many from Greenville.
But his connection to the city that raised him is complicated. There are no significant historical markers recognizing him. Last week, after his death, a side street was named in his honor near the house where he was born, a gesture that struck some supporters as hollow.
“It’s disappointing,” said Doris Gaddis, 67, as she walked on Haynie Street by that house, its white paint chipped, its screen door tattered. “I hope South Carolina wakes up to what this man did for us.”
As the country reflects on the legacy of Mr. Jackson, many residents in Greenville, a booming conservative area with a shrinking Black population, have begun to re-examine the its distant relationship with a homegrown leader of the civil rights movement. Some believe that, for too long, Greenville ignored Mr. Jackson and his local contributions, even as it was clear that Mr. Jackson never forgot where he came from.
Supporters still remember him as the local “super boy” who captained the football team and served as student body president at Sterling High School, exuding a confidence that bordered on egotistical yet also inspired his friends in a deeply segregated city.
That self-assurance propelled him to join union marches, take on big corporations and run for the White House as a Democrat in the 1980s. Yet some of his supporters wonder if those qualities, which endeared him to places like Chicago, also made celebrating him so challenging for a conservative, anti-union stronghold like South Carolina.
Other titans of the Southern civil rights movement have been more warmly embraced by their hometowns. John Lewis was always lionized in Atlanta, his image found across the city in statues, murals and museums. In Charlotte, N.C., Harvey B. Gantt, 83, the city’s first Black mayor and the first Black student accepted at Clemson University, has a cultural center named in his honor. And Birmingham, Ala., has long highlighted its standing as a touchstone of the civil rights movement, naming the city’s airport after a leader who survived racist attacks, and drawing visitors on somber tours of several Black history museums and trails.
Greenville, by contrast, has done little to publicly honor its native son. The most recent City Council meeting ended with a local minister’s plea for a Jesse Jackson statue, as he lamented that the city hadn’t recognized Mr. Jackson much earlier.
“You give people their flowers when they’re alive,” the minister, Clarence Thornton, said at the meeting.
Richard Kerns, 85, a running back in high school who received handoffs from Mr. Jackson, then the Tigers’ maverick quarterback, said his former teammate “put Greenville on the map.”
“I think they should celebrate his legacy more,” he added, “but they haven’t.”
Greenville was once a hollowed-out textile hub, but it went through a business renaissance as companies like BMW and Michelin moved in and created thousands of high-paying jobs. Recently, the city has attracted scores of transplants from other parts of the country. Many of those new residents have been drawn by Greenville’s conservative culture and its walkable downtown, which brims with bars, restaurants and shops.
Greenville was also once a beacon for segregationist ideas.
The founder of Bob Jones University, a Christian liberal arts school in Greenville, said in 1960 that “God is the author of segregation.” The school prohibited interracial dating until 2000. Vardry McBee, considered one of the founders of Greenville in the early 1800s, enslaved more than 50 people. His statue stands downtown.
And long after President Ronald Reagan made Martin Luther King’s Birthday a federal holiday, Greenville County was a holdout in making it a paid holiday for its workers. When Mr. Jackson learned of this in 2002, he flew to the county every few weeks to petition the government to begin honoring it. When that effort 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.
“There ought to be a statue of Jesse Jackson looking right at Vardry McBee,” said Davida Mathis, a lawyer and activist whose father coached Mr. Jackson in football. “Greenville owes him an honor that is commensurate with the service that he gave.”
In a ceremony last Monday to remember Mr. Jackson, Knox White, the popular Republican mayor of Greenville, recalled that the reverend had once told him that Greenville and the rest of the region “would not have the economy it has today without the Greenville Eight.”
“This is a story we have to keep telling,” Mr. White said. “And we’re going to find ways to tell that story into the future.”
Also looming over Greenville are concerns over gentrification, despite the city’s having invested more than $50 million in affordable housing in recent years and having given land to groups that build affordable housing. In the 1960s, more than a third of the city’s population was Black. By 2025, it had dipped to roughly 19 percent, as wealthy white families moved in, pushing out the working-class Black families whom Mr. Jackson had championed.
Leading up to Monday’s service for Mr. Jackson, many residents of Greenville had made plans to be there. Several said they were proud that Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, had honored the wishes of Mr. Jackson’s family and Black legislators to have him lie in the State House.
Some also expressed hope that the ceremony in Columbia, before his body goes to Washington, D.C., and then back to Chicago for burial, would be the start of a renewed appreciation of him in his birthplace.
On a recent afternoon, Woody Gaines, 58, was walking by the street newly named for Mr. Jackson. It was his day off from work at a nearby cemetery, where Mr. Jackson’s beloved mother, Helen Burns, is buried. Mr. Gaines keeps the grass kempt around her grave.
“I wish he would be buried here, too,” Mr. Gaines said. “But I always knew: Wherever Jesse went, Greenville went with him.”
Eduardo Medina is a Times reporter covering the South. An Alabama native, he is now based in Durham, N.C.
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