Born out of wedlock in Greenville, South Carolina, as Jesse Louis Burns, in 1941, Jackson, as a teenager, would take the last name of his stepfather. His childhood, like those of millions of Black people across the Jim Crow South, was one wracked by crippling poverty, rigid segregation, and the visceral, ever-present threat of physical violence. In a 1988 interview with Canadian television, he noted, “Suffice it to say, I grew up under the laws of apartheid in this country, lived under racial segregation, an environment that fostered low expectations. Something told me I could make a difference.”
An athlete, he traveled north to attend the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, only to drop out and return home to become a member of the “Greenville Eight,” who, in 1960, conducted sit-ins to integrate the Greenville County Public Library, thus marking his entry into the rapidly advancing Civil Rights Movement. Returning to school at North Carolina A&T College and marrying Jacqueline Lavinia Davis, he continued to help lead local protests and demonstrations. Following graduation, he enrolled at the Chicago Theological Seminary but left for Alabama after watching televised coverage of the “Bloody Selma” march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in 1965.
Galvanized by meeting Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Jackson eventually became a full-time organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), co-founded by King. Returning to Chicago, Jackson took charge of the SCLC’s economic program there, “Operation Breadbasket,” which was focused on improving employment opportunities and conditions for Black workers. Deeply ambitious, he quickly rose to lead the program nationwide.
His ascendance and his broader recognition within the movement led to his becoming a trusted figure in King’s inner circle. Indeed, he is captured in photographs standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, on April 4, 1968, along with some of King’s key deputies, Hosea Williams, Andrew Young, and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy. On that date, on that balcony, Jackson’s mentor and friend was assassinated, killed by a rifle shot to the neck. For those who were with him that day, especially Jackson, it would become a turning point in their lives. “We could not let one bullet kill the movement,” he said afterwards.
To Jackson, the loss was so profound that he is said to have worn a blood-soaked sweatshirt to Dr. King’s funeral. Many activists, however, argued that such a gesture was a sign of Jackson capitalizing on having been a witness to the civil rights icon’s death. Some who were present that day would contend the bloodstains couldn’t have been from the slain leader, given that Jackson never touched his body. And yet Jackson’s claim was credible: the hotel balcony had been covered with so much blood that it filled a Mason jar. Whatever the case, Jackson, wearing a dashiki and sporting his signature afro and mustache, re-invented himself as a national spokesperson for causes central to the Black experience, drawing distinctions between King’s brand of non-violence and the more radical strains of the emergent Black Power movement.