Memorial services for Rev. Jesse Jackson expanded to include South Carolina and Washington, DC

By SOPHIA TAREEN

CHICAGO (AP) — Memorial services honoring the life of the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. will be expanded beyond Chicago with events in Washington, D.C., and South Carolina, the late civil rights leader’s organization announced Thursday.

Jackson, a protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate, died earlier this week at age 84 after battling a rare neurological disorder that affected his ability to move and talk.

Jackson will still lie in repose next week at the Chicago headquarters of his Rainbow PUSH Coalition with a public celebration of life and homegoing services to follow, though dates for Chicago events have been changed. Formal services were added, scheduled from March 1 to March 4 in Washington, D.C., and South Carolina, where Jackson was born and raised.

Rainbow PUSH did not offer further details.

Jackson’s adult children gathered outside the family home in Chicago on Wednesday, saying the funeral services would be large gatherings where everyone would be welcomed. They also vowed to continue his decades of advocacy.

“Although his body is absent from us, his spirit suffuses and infuses us, and it charges us to continue with the work,” said Santita Jackson, his eldest child.

In Chicago, a public celebration of life will be held at House of Hope, a 10,000-seat church, on March 6, followed by private homegoing services the next day at Rainbow PUSH, which will be livestreamed.

Jackson rose to prominence six decades ago as a protégé of King, joining the voting rights march King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. King later dispatched Jackson to Chicago to launch Operation Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference effort to pressure companies to hire Black workers. Jackson was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was killed.