The public begins paying respects to the late Rev. Jesse Jackson Thursday. The civil rights icon will lie in repose in his hometown of Chicago through Friday before events next week in Washington, D.C. and in his native South Carolina.
"May he rest in peace, and may his spirit live forever," his daughter Santita Jackson said after Jackson's death last week at age 84. "Let us continue the work, everyone. That is what he would want us to do," encouraging a new generation to take up his fight.
You can't talk about Black political power in the U.S. without considering the groundbreaking presidential campaigns of Jackson in the 1980s, says the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Georgia senator.
"He gave me a glimpse of what is possible, and he taught me how to say I am somebody," says Warnock, one of five Black U.S. senators serving in Congress, a historic high. He says Jackson broadened the lane of what's politically possible for Black Americans and other people of color, forcing the Democratic Party to be more inclusive.
Warnock says Jackson's legacy should serve as a guidepost today.
"While he saw our power, the adversaries of progress and racial justice also saw our power," he says. "We are witnessing right now the kind of attack on voting rights that really does hearken back to the darkest days of the civil rights struggle."
He points to the Trump administration's recent FBI raid that seized ballots in Fulton County, Ga., and immigration crackdowns in Minnesota, where federal agents killed Americans.
Rep. Shomari Figures (D-Ala.) represents a district created by federal courts to assure Black voter representation. He says Jackson was a bridge figure in the movement who fought to see that legislative gains like the Voting Rights Act were enforced so that Black citizens would have a say in government.
"What was actually tougher than getting those rights on paper was the actual implementation of those rights," says Figures. "Jesse Jackson was the one that was there to say, 'Yes, we have rights on paper, but having them on paper is not enough. You have to be true to what it says on paper. You have to actually give us an opportunity.'"
Figures, who is serving his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives, says he is a beneficiary of that work. Now he worries the gains are being eroded as he sees the Trump administration scale back DEI efforts across government agencies and in higher education and propose voting restrictions.
"I think right now we are certainly in a phase of preservation," he says. "We're in the part of the game now where we are having to protect it, in some cases, get the ball back."
Figures says staying in the fight will take vigilance and invigorating a younger generation of voters to understand what's at stake.
Others are also taking inspiration from Jackson's example.
"Jesse Jackson's legacy isn't just a look backwards to celebrate what he did. It's the recognition of what we are required to do facing forward," says Maya Wiley, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 240 national groups.
"The state of the civil rights movement is alive and well," Wiley says. "And deeply committed to ensuring that we continue to have a multiracial democracy and the civil rights that it requires."
She's encouraged by what she's seen of protesters coming together in places like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Chicago. "So many people who are not directly impacted are outraged and are protesting. That has always been how the civil rights movement has organized and won," Wiley says.
"We're witnessing the very thing that Jesse Jackson always understood, which is that we're all in this together and that really most Americans understand that."
At the grassroots level, the work is being pushed forward by people like Michelle Browder, an artist in Montgomery, Ala. Her warehouse studio is just blocks away from what was once the city's slave market, and the spot where Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat.
She leads what she calls "more than tours" about the rich civil rights history here.
"We want you to see this history from a different perspective, but also reckon with it," says Browder, who has installed a giant porch chair intended to provoke a frank dialogue on racial justice.
"The time in which we're living now is that we're afraid to have these conversations. We're afraid of what we see," she says. "But it's the freedom and the liberation that comes from seeing what we've done in this country to one another. In order for us to be free, we have to reckon with it. We have to receive the truth."
Now, as the nation prepares to mourn Jackson, civil rights leaders say the truth is more urgent than ever as the Trump administration seeks to remove artifacts of America's racial history from U.S. cultural institutions.
After the two days of public viewing at the Chicago Headquarters of his Rainbow Push Coalition, Jackson will lie in state at the South Carolina statehouse Monday and then travel to Washington, D.C. for additional services. Several governors have ordered flags to be flown at half-staff in honor of Jackson, but no such federal order has come from the White House. His final homegoing service will be back in Chicago on March 7th.
Copyright 2026 NPR
