Editor's Note: Rev. Jesse Jackson, the legendary civil rights activist and two-time presidential candidate who fundamentally reshaped American politics and inspired generations of African Americans to seek elected office, has died. He was 83.Jackson's passing marks the end of an era in American political and social history. From his emergence as a leader in the civil rights movement in the early 1960s to his groundbreaking presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, Jackson's life was defined by an unwavering commitment to social and economic justice.The article that follows, originally published by The Conversation last year, examines how Jackson's Southern identity shaped his life's work and his enduring influence on American politics. It is reprinted here as a tribute to his legacy.Holding hands with other prominent Black leaders, the Rev. Jesse Jackson crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 9, 2025, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” Like several survivors of that violent day in 1965, when police brutally attacked civil rights protesters, Jackson crossed the bridge in a wheelchair.Jesse Louis Jackson was born Oct. 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, a town firmly entrenched in the racially segregated Deep South. This time and place aren’t footnotes to Jackson’s life, but rather key facts that shaped his civil rights activism and historic runs for the U.S. presidency.Growing up in the segregated South shaped Jackson’s attitudes, opinions and outlook in ways that remain apparent today. While he lived in Chicago for most of his adult life, he remained a Southerner. And other Southerners viewed him as such. Jackson biographer David Masciotra said the South gave Jackson “a sense of the oppression and the persecution that he wanted to fight.”As scholars of Southern politics, we see Jackson’s Southern identity as essential to understanding his life. Southerners often identify with the region, even after leaving the geographic South. As sociologist John Shelton Reed once wrote, Southernness has more to do with attitude than latitude. A segregated childhoodIn the South Carolina of Jackson’s youth, water fountains, bathrooms, swimming pools and lunch counters were all segregated. While white people his age attended Greenville High School, Jackson attended the all-Black Sterling High School, where he was a star quarterback and class president. His experience of segregation shaped how Jackson views his life.“I keep thinking about the odds,” Jackson told his biographer and fellow South Carolinian Marshall Frady in 1988, marveling at the “responsibility I have now against what I was expected then to be doing at this stage of life.” “Even mean ole segregation couldn’t break in on me and steal my soul,” he later told Frady. If Jackson had been white, a star student like him might have enrolled at Clemson University or the University of South Carolina. Or he might have said yes when he was offered a contract to play professional baseball. Instead, Jackson rejected the contract because the pay would be approximately six times less than a white player’s and went North, to the University of Illinois. He did not find a more welcoming atmosphere in Champaign, Illinois. According to biographer Barbara Reynolds, the segregation that he thought he had left behind “cropped up in Illinois to convince him that was not the place to be.” In the fall of 1960, Jackson transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a historically Black college in Greensboro, North Carolina, to complete his sociology degree.His return to the South marked Jackson’s emergence as a leader in the growing Civil Rights Movement. Greensboro was a center of this struggle, with large, regular demonstrations, often led by local students of color. Six months prior to his arrival in Greensboro, four Black students from North Carolina A&T refused to leave the whites-only Woolworth lunch counter, launching a sit-in movement that soon drew national attention.Jackson himself led protests to integrate Greensboro businesses. After one pivotal student march on City Hall, he was arrested and charged with inciting a riot. In jail, Jackson wrote a “Letter From a Greensboro Jail,” a rhetorical tip of the hat to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” A move northJackson’s second move north, in 1964, stuck.Like so many other Black Southerners who participated in what later became known as the “second great migration,” Jackson went to Chicago. He attended Chicago Theological Seminary, inspired not by a deep love of scripture but by what Jackson perceived as the church’s ability to do good on this earth. As North Carolina A&T’s president, Dr. Sam Proctor, advised Jackson, “You don’t have to enter the ministry because you want to save people from a burning hell.