Jesse Jackson turned down a pro baseball contract that paid 6x less than a white player. Here’s how segregation shaped him

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. Jackson died on Feb. 17, 2026, at age 84.

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 childhood

In 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 viewed 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........

© Fortune