The back row isn’t likely to be silent. It rarely is when people are talking to the Lord.
It isn’t likely to be empty, either.
And yet, someone will be missed.
“When Jesse Jackson, Dr. Jackson, was in town,” says the Rev. Sean Dogan, “he would frequently come by Long Branch [Baptist Church] and just sit in the back. So you had this huge national figure who would just humbly come sit in the back and talk to friends that he grew up with.”
It’s not an overstatement to say that the Rev. Jesse Jackson was a world figure on par with presidents, even if his own ambitions to be a head of state never panned out.
It’s not hyperbole to say that Barack Obama’s presidency owes a debt to Jackson, who ran for the Democratic nomination twice and introduced the country to a viable African-American candidate.
It’s not unfair to remember Jackson as a controversial figure who was no fan of Gov. Bill Clinton, or for whom infidelity and financial impropriety would mar a piece of his image.
So as he is laid to rest, maybe it’s fair to say that the community that knew Jackson personally, as a neighbor and a son, remembers him as a complicated man who lived an extraordinary -- yet extraordinarily simple, in some ways -- life.
Long Branch Baptist Church, where Dogan is pastor, sits on Bolt St. in Greenville. It’s barely a mile from Sterling Community Center, which, in the 1950s, was Sterling High School -- a segregated school from which Jackson would graduate.
As far as the world took Jackson, his mother, Helen Burns Jackson, lived close to this church, this school, this community center, for 92 years until she died in 2015. Jackson would frequently come home to see her, sometimes with fanfare, sometimes quietly.
And when he was in town, he would visit local churches, sometimes to preach, sometimes to sit in the back, usually to meet people and talk to neighbors and family and friends.
“My family has known the Rev. Jackson since he was a little boy,” said Greenville City Councilman Ken Gibson. “And I have known him since I was a little boy.”
Gibson is the son of Lottie Gibson, who, 11 years older than Jesse Jackson, also graduated from Sterling, and later worked there as a counselor.
In 1960, eight students, including a young Jesse Jackson, banded together to desegregate Greenville’s city libraries. They became known as the Greenville Eight.
“My mother was one of the people who helped organize them in that event,” Gibson said.
The city, for the record, not only didn’t desegregate the libraries following the protests, officials simply closed them for everyone.
But this casual relationship between Ken Gibson and Jesse Jackson, whose mothers were good friends, emphasizes the duality of who Jackson was to Greenville.
“He was definitely a rock star,” Dogan said. And yet Dogan remembers how he first got to meet Jackson.
“When I came to Long Branch 28 years ago,” Dogan said, “I thought it was this novel idea to start a scholarship fund. I heard chatter in the congregation telling me that Jesse Jackson had come to preach at Long Branch about a year before I came, and that he gave money to start a scholarship fund. Well, the scholarship fund never got started.”
So the young pastor did what anyone with a good connection might do.
“I called Ms. Lottie Gibson and told her about it and said, you know, I have an idea -- how do I get in touch with Dr. Jackson?,” he said. “And she gave me his cell number. So you have this young 21-, 22-year-old novice pastor who calls a national figure on his cell phone that he did not give the number to.”
And when they connected?
“When I told him who I was, he lit up over the phone,” Dogan said.
It’s this kind of intimacy with the community that people who knew Jackson think about when you say his name.
“When I think of Jesse Jackson, I think of a person who did not forget where he came from,” Dogan said.
Ken Gibson thinks so too.
“I think about him with his mom,” Gibson said. “Those, for me, were the most telling points of him. I can tell you about speeches that I've heard him give -- and I'm going to tell you, he was such a tremendous speaker. But if you asked me what are the most striking memories for me, it is really when he came home to see his mom.”
Helen and Jesse Jackson were so respected in Greenville that when Mrs. Jackson died, it was not just family who showed for her funeral.
“I was in the hallway when his mother passed,” said the Rev. Emmanuel Flemming, president of the Greenville chapter of NAACP. “I had the honor of being on that program. And in the hallway was President Bill Clinton, Al Sharpton, Dr. Otis Moss. And I'm standing there in the hallway with them talking and having these conversations, about not only Dr. Jackson, but of course his mother.”
So close, in fact, are the local ties to Jesse Jackson that Flemming -- son of Greenville County Councilwoman Lillian Brock Flemming -- is in Jackson’s family line.
“My father's actually related to him through his granddaddy,” Flemming said.
Flemming’s father was also heavily involved in Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign. Something the reverend said Jackson never forgot.
While getting an award in South Carolina for his dedication to civil rights some years back, Jackson paused.
“He ended up actually telling everybody to stand up on their feet and give a round of applause to my mother … and my father,” Flemming said. “I thought that was so remarkable to come from him to say that, to have them in his moment, to pause and to applaud my parents. I mean, I just spoke volumes of him.”
Humility is a common theme when people who Jesse Jackson him talk about him. Even when he was, quite literally, on the national stage, he was a humble man who liked to help his native community, but also tapped into it when he needed help himself.
“When he ran for president, for whatever reason, and I can't remember, [Jackson’s mother] didn't have credentials to go,” said Greenville resident Billy Webster. “He calls, in all humility and says, ‘I can't get my mom up here.”
“Here” was the 1992 Democratic National Convention in New York.
“I didn't ask him why, he just said, ‘Can you help?’” Webster said.
Webster’s father and former South Carolina Gov. Dick Riley were neighbors; the Rileys were the Websters’ family friends.
Webster had also worked on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign and was able to use his connection to Riley -- who became U.S. Secretary of Education in the Clinton administration, and for whom Webster would serve as chief of staff -- and Clinton to “get his mom up there, get her credentialed, get her a plane ticket,” Webster said.
He called the exchange with Jackson “a very human interaction.”
Webster had met Jackson a few years earlier, in the mid-1980s. At that time, Webster and his family had operated Carabo Inc., the largest franchisee of the Bojangles restaurant chain.
But also at that time, South Carolina had one of the lowest rates of registered voters in the country.
“We started thinking about, as a company, some way to impact that,” Webster said. “I reached out to the Rev. Jackson … and he came up with this interesting idea, which was to use the placemat that we put on our trays to be a voter registration form.”
The campaign -- which involved Bojangles employees becoming notaries -- signed up thousands of new voters in six months, Webster said, and hammered home Jackson’s commitment to voting.
Voting is also a big deal to Peggy Baxter, who technically was in school with Jackson at Sterling, but was four years his senior and, thus, didn’t know him then.
But in 2002, soon after Baxter had come back to Greenville from the West Coast, she found herself getting involved in the local chapter of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition -- Jackson’s national organization “dedicated to improving the economic conditions of black communities across the United States (sic),” according to the coalition’s website. The aim was to get Martin Luther King Jr. Day recognized as a holiday by the Greenville County Council.
Greenville was the last county in the United States to adopt MLK Day as a holiday. Jackson led that charge.
“Reverend Jackson came several times and met with us and strategized,” Baxter said. “We had a walk across the bridge on Church Street with several thousand people. And then we developed a political strategy. That worked. And in 2004, the County Council voted to have Martin Luther King Jr's birthday as a holiday in the county.”
Baxter said that working on that goal “was sort of my real introduction to the Rev. Jackson and his focus and determination. But also his willingness to engage in difficult situations and to involve as many people as possible.”
Baxter’s work with Jackson inspired her to educate community members about the political process and to get people voting.
“I work hard to get people registered to vote and to get them to the polls,” she said. “What concerns me is that many, many individuals who are registered to vote don't actually vote, and I don't understand that. But I try to work and encourage and provide support to change the numbers of people [registered] who are most at risk.”
Beyond political activism, Jesse Jackson directly inspired Greenville residents like Willie Mae Taylor, who first met Jackson as a girl.
“He came to the school and he did a whole lot of talk in school to try to tell us we could do better,” Taylor said.
Taylor describes herself as the kind of girl who sat in the back of the classroom and hid from the teachers’ questions. That is, until Jesse Jackson showed up and told her she could be whatever she wanted.
“When he said that,” she said, “I put my shy to the side.”
Quite far to the side, actually. Taylor went on to have a modeling career and today does volunteer work with fellow seniors at Sterling Community Center.
She remembers Jackson as someone who valued family, even if it wasn’t his own.
“He came to Greenville and we was at the Cleveland Park,” Taylor said. “And all of the sudden he ran and grabbed my two girls. And then he had both of them in his arms, walking. And he told me they was beautiful girls, they’re smart.”
Taylor said her daughters were so taken by him that when it was time for them to leave, “they were wanting to go with Mr. Jackson.”
She said the Taylor ladies would frequently get visits from Jackson when he came home to Greenville.
These small encounters balance the portrait of a complicated man. One who was no stranger to controversy and who had the ear of world leaders and used his name to leverage the freeing of American hostages overseas and try to broker peace deals.
“He was a giant and he is definitely going to be missed,” said Ken Gibson. “And I don't think that a lot of people really understand all of the doors that he opened with his life. I don't think a lot of people really understand the reverberations of the work that he did and how much it has made life better for other people. I mean, he was just a remarkable, remarkable, remarkable man.”
And, said the Rev. Sean Dogan, “it's amazing that home doesn't always see you as this national giant. But home really is proud.”
