After a Lifetime of Service, Jesse Jackson Denied Capitol Lie-in-State Honor

By Wane A. Hailes President/Publisher, The Courier Eco Latino

There are moments in a nation’s life when symbolism tells the whole story. The reported decision to deny the late Jesse Jackson the honor of lying in state at the U.S. Capitol — while elevating and memorializing conservative activist Charlie Kirk — is one of those moments.

It is not a matter of protocol. It is not a scheduling oversight. It is a reflection of whose legacy is considered sacred — and whose is treated as negotiable.

Rev. Jackson was not simply a Black leader. He was a towering architect of modern American democracy. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr., carried forward the Poor People’s Campaign, registered millions of Black voters across the South, helped negotiate the release of hostages abroad, fought apartheid in South Africa, and twice mounted historic presidential campaigns that expanded the nation’s political imagination.

For more than five decades, he stood in the gap for the poor, the marginalized, and the forgotten — urging America to live up to its creed.

Yet, at his passing, the full symbolic weight of the nation’s highest civic honor has not been extended.

By contrast, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk — a deeply polarizing political figure whose influence was rooted in grievance-driven conservatism — federal gestures of mourning were swift and visible. Flags were lowered to half-staff. Official tributes flowed.

The contrast speaks louder than any press statement.

One man spent his life working to expand democracy and bridge racial and economic divides. The other built a career inside a media ecosystem fueled by cultural confrontation and ideological warfare.

And yet, the unifier appears sidelined while the provocateur is elevated.

The Capitol Rotunda is more than marble and ceremony. It is the nation’s civic altar. To grant or withhold that honor is to make a statement about who embodies America’s highest ideals.

To exclude Jesse Jackson from that sacred recognition signals something troubling: that the moral labor of Black leaders — even those who reshaped the democratic landscape — can still be minimized when it proves politically inconvenient.

This decision does not exist in isolation. It lands amid broader battles over the teaching of Black history, the dismantling of diversity initiatives, and efforts to sanitize the Civil Rights Movement into something less disruptive, less confrontational, less transformative than it truly was.

Rev. Jackson carried forward Dr. King’s unfinished work when it was unpopular — and dangerous — to do so. He endured threats, ridicule, and political resistance while insisting that justice belonged to everyone.

To deny him equal symbolic honor is not merely an insult to one man’s memory. It is a statement about which version of American history is being curated — and which is being quietly shelved.

History will record who was honored.

But it will also record who was overlooked.

Because when a nation diminishes its moral giants while elevating its ideological allies, it reveals which story it prefers to tell about itself.

And in that choice lies the truest measure of justice.