'He had a radiating aura': Chicagoans say goodbye to hometown civil rights hero Jesse Jackson [View all]

Source: The Guardian

Sun 1 Mar 2026 08.00 EST
Last modified on Sun 1 Mar 2026 08.02 EST


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’.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/01/jesse-jackson-casket-chicago