Rev. Jesse Jackson remembered by Atlanta HBCUs
Atlanta’s historically Black colleges are honoring the legacy of Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights icon who championed HBCUs across the country until his death Tuesday.
Jackson was himself an HBCU alum, graduating from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 1964. And the 84-year-old had ties to HBCUs in the Peach State.
He had two honorary degrees from Clark Atlanta University, awarded in 1988 and 2017; the former was in the final commencement of Clark College before it merged with Atlanta University to become CAU. He “shared a lasting bond” with CAU, the school said in a social media post Tuesday.
“His life’s work and enduring connection to CAU reflect a legacy rooted in service, scholarship, and the relentless pursuit of freedom,” wrote the private university. “Rest in power to a giant whose voice helped shape history and whose influence will forever inspire our Panther Nation.”
Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Jackson regularly spoke at the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel on Morehouse College’s campus. He gave the school’s commencement address during his 1984 presidential campaign and visited campus on Election Day 2018. The all-men’s historically Black college said his speeches at Morehouse challenged students to vote, organize, and lead.
“Rev. Jackson’s life reminds us that leadership requires courage, conviction, and action,” the school said in a social media post.
The Morehouse School of Medicine wrote that Jackson’s “call to ‘Keep Hope Alive’ lives on in our work every day.”
Paine College, a private historically Black college in Augusta, hosted Jackson in 2001 and 2019. And he surprised a class at Spelman College in January 2004, lecturing students about voting and civil rights. Ashley Laverne Jackson, one of his six children, graduated from the private all-women’s school, according to her website.
Spelman professor Shola Lynch has been working on a documentary about Jackson for several years. She noted Tuesday that the interviews she and her film team did with Jackson were much like how he lived: spontaneous, challenging, joyful and impactful.
Lynch said she spent countless hours with the civil rights activist and his family. Those conversations included Ambassador Andrew Young, another lion of the civil rights movement, in Atlanta.
“The South is part of the story,” she said. “Atlanta is part of the story.”
A specific date for the documentary’s release hasn’t been set, but there are plans for a global release and a film festival. Lynch said she hopes audiences will see Jackson’s humility and humanity when the film is released.
“I hope they get to know the reverend from the film, and I hope they wrestle with the questions he wrestled with personally and politically,” she said.
For some metro Atlanta residents who graduated from Jackson’s alma mater, like Chiquita Mays, they know Jackson as “one of ours.”
Mays, who owns an engineering firm in Atlanta and serves on the board of visitors at North Carolina A&T State, said Jackson casts a large shadow over what is now the largest historically Black university in the country.
“When we hear him say, ‘Keep hope alive,’ for us as Aggies, and especially for me, it means something different,” Mays said, who graduated from the school in 1995. “I always tell people that hope is the greatest gift of all. If we are going to excel and succeed, we have to keep hope. We can’t ever lose hope. He embodied that so much and reminded us that we belong in every space.”
Staff writer Ernie Suggs contributed to this article.
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