More than a week of celebration and funeral services for Rev. Jesse Jackson begins Thursday in Chicago

Andrew Carter, Chicago Tribune on Feb 26, 2026

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CHICAGO — By Wednesday afternoon, the day before the first public visitation for the Rev. Jesse Jackson, long rows of barricades stretched throughout the parkway in the middle of Drexel Boulevard, where thousands are expected to gather Thursday and Friday to honor one of America’s most enduring civil rights leaders.

More than a week of services and funerals in memory of Jackson will begin Thursday morning at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the civil rights organization he founded on the South Side in 1971. The visitation will begin at 10 a.m. and end at 10 p.m. on Thursday and Friday at the coalition’s headquarters at 930 E. 50th St.

On Wednesday, a small group of workers prepared the grounds and the park across the street for those who will come to celebrate and to mourn. A small stage had been erected in the park near the coalition’s front entrance, along with the crowd-control barricades that lined the sidewalks for hundreds of yards in either direction.

Thursday is the beginning of a three-city, nine-day memorial tour, of sorts, that will also end in Chicago. After he lies in repose Thursday and Friday at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, Jackson, who died earlier this month at age 84, will lie in state on Monday at the South Carolina state capitol in Columbia. He was born about 100 miles away, in Greenville, S.C., in 1941.

Jackson ascended to national prominence not long after his arrival in Chicago in 1964 to attend the Chicago Theological Seminary. A year later he participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches, and he became a close friend and protege of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jackson’s family has scheduled a formal service in his honor for next Wednesday in Washington, D.C. The mourning and celebration will continue the next day in Chicago, where Rainbow/PUSH will host a service for the organization and its alumni. A public funeral is scheduled for Friday, March 6, at House of Hope at 752 E. 114th St.

His family has invited President Donald Trump and every living former president to attend.

A private funeral service, which Jackson’s family is describing as a “homegoing celebration,” is scheduled for next Saturday, March 7, at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.

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