GREENVILLE, S.C. — Black children in Greenville couldn’t wait to grow up and go to Sterling High School, many graduates recall. Now what remains are memories of its majorettes and its championship sports and its excellent, committed teachers.A young Jesse Jackson shone there, as a three-letter a thlete who earned a football scholarship, as an activist and as an all-around student. Known to set hearts on campus aflutter, he graced many a page in the 1959 Torch yearbook published by the county’s oldest Black high school.On an unofficial tour of “Jesse Jackson” landmarks, there’s not much left to see of the school, which mysteriously burned in 1967.There also are few markers to highlight historic integration and civil rights efforts made by Jackson and others that altered Greenville's history, current leaders say, and continue to shape it today.Jackson’s home state on Monday granted him a hero’s welcome, acknowledging him as a son of South Carolina. It cordoned off its grand Capitol rotunda for a lying in honor so thousands of ordinary citizens could pay their respects to one of the most influential Americans to come from the Palmetto State. His casket processed through the streets, drawn by horses, and flags were dropped to half staff. A horse-drawn caisson with the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s casket arrives to lay in honor at the South Carolina Capitol on March 2.Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times Now his rapidly gentrifying hometown is discussing how to extend honors to their most famous son and the rich legacy that surrounded him.“South Carolina has stepped up to the plate, and everything I've seen, I've just been very, very impressed,” says Peggy Baxter, fellow Sterling graduate and a key figure with Jackson in organizing to get Greenville County to adopt the federal Martin Luther King birthday holiday.Many folks in Greenville claim ties to the internationally-known Jackson, who died on Feb 17 at age 84, but his contemporaries are getting on in years and passing on. Peggy Baxter in the original gym of Sterling High School, where she and a young Jesse Jackson graduated. It is now part of the Sterling Community Center. Plans are in the works for a green space behind the center and a memorial for Jackson.Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times So they’re mapping out a Sterling Community Memorial Grove, a $2.3 million project that will add pecan wood benches, walking paths and trees to green up the space behind a community center that was once the high school’s gym, along with a torch monument — a nod to the yearbook — and a memorial for Jackson.“So people will not forget Sterling,” says Jameka Murphy, of the Sterling Land Trust, aimed at preserving access to the surrounding historically Black neighborhood for longtime families who might otherwise be priced out if the homes were redeveloped. “They can come and be like, ‘Yeah, this is where I went to school, I remember this, and the dances,” says Murphy.Sitting in a bright hallway inside the community center that’s papered in yearbook pages and school photographs, Baxter says she graduated in the gym in the 1950s — and now is a regular at the center’s senior citizen programs. Tiger faces painted on the gym floor and carved into a metal bike rack out front hearkens back to Sterling’s Tigers mascot. A plaque commemorates the old Sterling High School, outside what is now the Sterling Community Center. Jesse Jackson graduated from in 1959 from Sterling, considered the county’s oldest Black high school.Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times “There's still a really great spirit with some of the alums now in remembering Sterling and wanting to do great things in terms of this community and really bringing improvement, because it really took a nosedive, and it's coming back,” says Baxter, a Sterling Land Trust board member.Across one street from the community center, crews banged on the frame of a future McMansion. Across another, new houses signaled price tags that eclipse the older homes with their trendy black window frames.“Even just in the last five years, it changed a lot,” Murphy says of the neighborhood where a teenaged Jackson could walk to school from the family home where his beautician mother did hair. “And I think the older people, they don't want so much change. They want people to remember what it used to be and what that emotion was like when they went here because they felt like they already lost a lot in the fire.”The building boom follows what’s been happening in other legacy Black neighborhoods, including Haynie-Sirrine, where Jackson’s mother birthed him inside a tiny one-story home that at the time had no indoor bathroom. Today the modest house is one of three stark outliers amid new construction. Signs for the Greenville block where Jesse Jackson grew up were approved in 2022, but they weren’t installed until after Jackson’s death last month. Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times It wasn’t until after Jackson died last month that state crews put up large green rectangles announcing “Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. Street,” signs that had been approved in 2022. The housing projects where he lived in his youth, named for him in the 1980s, have since been demolished.There’s another plaque in town that honors Jackson, “probably the only marker with his name on it,” as longtime City Council member Lillian Brock Flemming says.It dates back to one of the times older folks remember Jackson returning to town in 1967 to lend his organizing power as director of Operation Breadbasket after moving away in 1964, landing eventually and permanently in Chicago. The Rev. Jesse Jackson brought Dr. Martin Luther King to Greenville in 1967 to work together to take on discrimination at The Claussen Bakery.Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times Amid a strike at the Claussen Bakery protesting discrimination against Black workers in hiring practices and promotions, Jackson showed up with his influential friend and mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and pulled together a march.“Because of that march, it did not take Claussen’s Bakery long, they began to hire Blacks for truck drivers, Blacks to work in the store and other high level employees,” Flemming recalled.Claussen’s Bakery appears on the Black history tour touted on Greenville’s website. Jesse Jackson and then-NAACP president Kweisi Mfume, center, join hands as they march in Greenville, SC, on May 17, 2003. They were rallying to protest the Greenville County council’s decision not to recognize a Martin Luther King Holiday.AP Photo/Mary Ann Chastain There is nothing in Greenville to commemorate the marches and sleep-in at County Square that Jackson led in the early 2000s to pressure Greenville County officials to adopt a paid federal MLK birthday holiday two decades after President Ronald Reagan signed it into law.Leola Robinson-Simpson, who had met Jackson at Sterling, got involved. She’d become the statewide president of the NAACP’s youth council and she says her activism and visibility in the local papers later got her run out of Greenville. Former South Carolina State Rep. Leola Robinson-Simpson in her Greenville home on March 3. She and Jesse Jackson met as classmates at Greenville’s Sterling High School.Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times “Jesse had come down, and he was just determined to do some things to make sure that Greenville wasn't the only [county] in the union that hadn't passed the national King holiday, so he was in and out of Greenville all the time,” says Robinson-Simpson, a former South Carolina state representative. Jesse led a mass demonstration of an estimated 30,000 across a bridge, and then a second march down Main Street, she says.And nothing stands to honor the Greenville Eight or mark the county library branch where eight NAACP youth council members, including a 19-year-old Jackson home from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They sat in the well appointed whites-only library to protest segregation’s shoddy conditions at the “colored library” until police were called. That marked Jackson’s first arrest for civil disobedience. News The Rev. Jesse Jackson comes home to South Carolina, the place that molded the man Chicago knew Jackson lay in honor at the South Carolina State Capitol on Monday. His ties to the state and Greenville, his hometown that nurtured him and inspired his activism, always remained strong. [month] [day], [year], [hour]:[minute][ampm] [timezone]   By Lauren FitzPatrick  and  Somer Van Benton, audio read At best, the city installed a bronze statue of a pair of Black children outside the former Woolworth’s five-and-dime store where Sterling High School students, including some of the Greenville Eight, staged sit-ins at lunch counters and picketed. Ultimately a 1963 Supreme Court decision struck down such segregation.Rev. Stacy Mills, the pastor of Mountain View Baptist Church, is tasked with leading the city’s efforts for a monument. He called the “best tribute to Rev. Jackson” a concrete commitment to economic security for everyone in Greenville.“So we are required to dedicate ourselves to economic equality in deed, not word,” Mills says, “and a commitment to a tangible memorial to the work of this Greenvillian born and forged in this community whose work is felt around the world.”What that memorial will look like or where it should go remains to be seen. Greenville Mayor Knox White says that meetings with key people were first held more than a year ago and city staff have been assigned to support such a project. Greenville Mayor Knox White speaks during a private service for the Rev. Jesse Jackson inside the South Carolina Capitol on March 2.Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times “Rev. J and I always discussed ways in which he’d be honored,” White says. “He was grateful. Lots of private citizens have long expressed willingness to help.“The city is full of commemorative art, including to civil rights-era themes and people. There has never been much question about Rev Jackson’s legacy being a part of that.”At the private Capitol ceremony for Jackson in Columbia, White used his remarks to thank Jackson for helping to modernize and reinvigorate Greenville, long ago booming with textile mills, by insisting on desegregation.“By tearing down the walls of segregation, Rev. Jackson and other courageous leaders also blazed a new path of freedom for the people of South Carolina and allowed our state to become the place it is today,” White told Jackson’s relatives and the invited dignitaries. “As he would remind us in more recent times, it is unimaginable that a BMW or a Boeing would locate in a segregated South Carolina. Of course not. He freed us all.” ...read more read less