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Some were older, some were younger and some were strangers, but many more were friends – they had lined up down the blocks of Chicago in mercifully mild weather for a chance to say goodbye to the civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.
Friday was the last day of public visitation as Jackson lay in repose at the headquarters of his Rainbow/Push political activism coalition in the city he called home.
Jackson died in Chicago on 17 February, at the age of 84. On Saturday he began his last journey, by road from the city near the tip of Lake Michigan to the state of his birth, South Carolina, where he will lie in repose at the state capitol in Columbia ahead of funeral services on Monday.
Standing stoically among the hundreds on Friday was Marva Watts, 85, a retired college professor from the South Side whose husband, the Rev William “Bill” Watts, knew Jackson well.
“My late husband, who passed last May, worked very closely with Reverend Jackson and Rainbow/Push many years earlier, you know, in his life, before he took ill,” she said, talking to the Guardian under partly sunny skies and unseasonably warm temperatures after the recent deep freeze.
Watts had turned out in her husband’s memory “and also just in recognition of all the work that Reverend Jackson and his organization have done for our people, for our country as well, just remembering ‘I am somebody’ and ‘keep hope alive’. I remember even some sermons my husband preached with that theme, and it always reminds us of Reverend Jackson. I’m just thinking of God saying ‘Well done’ for both of them,” she said.
Jackson only retired in 2023 from the Rainbow/Push Coalition that was a merger of two non-profit organizations he founded to focus on civil rights and political activism – stepping aside through ill health after more than six decades in national and international racial and social justice movements.
One of the younger people waiting to pay his respects to Jackson on Friday was Ethan Davis, 17, a high school student from the west suburbs of Chicago, who was lucky enough to meet the civil rights giant by chance when he was just a kid.
“It was back in 2017 and we were coming home, we’re in Chicago [O’Hare Airport] … I could see this man walking with a suit and a group of people. And my mother brought me to the side and explained that that man was very important. He worked with Martin Luther King Jr, and is a very important individual in the civil rights movement,” Davis said.
He continued: “He had a radiating aura off of him. And I asked my mother, ‘Could I shake his hand?’ My mother is like, ‘No, we don’t want to bother him, leave him alone. He seems busy.’ And then next thing I know, I see Reverend Jesse Jackson walking towards the both of us and ask how we are, how we are doing. It seemed at that moment, it was just like a guardian angel just walking up, even as a boy, even though I didn’t fully understand anything, I could just feel a large presence from him. So of course, I was able to shake his hand. I thanked him for all of his service that he’s done to [protect] human rights in America … I was able to take a picture with him and my mother.”
Alongside the waiting mourners, stallholders had set up to sell commemorative T-shirts, pan-African flags and art prints. There was a pop-up screen that played Jackson’s most famous speeches on repeat, especially his 1988 Democratic convention speech where he urged Americans suffering inequality to “keep hope alive!”
Kenneth LeDale, 40, a military veteran from Chicago’s South Side, said: “Jesse Jackson has done so much for us as a people, and even more so for me personally as a young Black man. I’m so fortunate to never know the battles that I never had to fight [personally] because they did it for me … the fight for desegregation and knowing that I can’t even fathom a world where I can’t just walk in and sit down and eat, I can’t drink at a water fountain.”
Diallo Ismail, 60, a business owner from Chicago, had not met Jackson but heard about him when he lived previously in Guinea in west Africa, describing him as a “worldwide icon”.
“He fights for freedom, he fights for everybody. So we’re gonna miss him,” he said.
Meanwhile Adele Stichel, 36, a lawyer and former Democratic candidate for Virginia’s fifth congressional district in Charlottesville, first met Jackson when he came to her class at the University of Chicago.
“I had always known who he was but I had this understanding of him that I think was really shaped by a pretty inaccurate sense that he’d be loud or radical and he was just, he’s actually really soft-spoken, and he had all these thoughts about policy,” she said.
Stichel thought his ideas were fascinating and she went to volunteer at Rainbow/Push, eventually ending up working there as an assistant.
“Then he officiated my wedding,” she said. “I think about him all the time. I quit my job working for a big firm recently and I ran for Congress in large part because of working for the reverend.”
Stichel recalled Jackson as “incredibly kind”.
“People know that he was brilliant and he was impactful, but he was also just a really kind person,” she said.
