After a storied civil rights career, Jesse Jackson headed home to South Carolina to lie in state

By JEFFREY COLLINS

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson Sr. was honored Monday in the state where he grew up under segregation with a hero’s memorial, his flag-draped casket under the Capitol’s rotunda and thousands of people circling the Statehouse grounds waiting to honor him.

A horse-drawn caisson brought Jackson’s body to the Capitol, where white-gloved state troopers brought the casket inside, where Jackson was only the second Black person to lie in state.

The service started with a rousing version of the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” that reverberated through the Statehouse — a building that was partially destroyed in 1865 during the Civil War, which South Carolina started to keep slavery.

Before the doors opened to the public, politicians and other guests remembered a man who grew up in Greenville and, in 1960, led seven Black high school students into the whites-only library branch. They sat down, quietly read books and magazines, and were arrested. And Jackson’s civil rights career began.

“Because of his efforts, I can sit where I am today,” said Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, who has served 33 years in Congress and first met Jackson when they were on rival high school sports teams in segregated South Carolina. They forged a lif...