Mother of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson dies

Helen Burns Jackson, who gave birth at the age of 16 to a boy who would grow up to become one of the nation’s most prominent civil rights leaders and run for president twice, died Monday. She was 92.

She had been in declining health for several years but didn’t suffer from any chronic disease, her son, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, said.

“God has given her a long life and he’s letting her down easy,” Jackson said during a meeting with editors and reporters of The Greenville News a few days before his mother’s death.

He remembered her as the embodiment of Christian charity, and as a lifelong advisor who always kept him going back to the Scriptures for guidance.

“She was a cosmetologist by trade. She was a Christian social worker by her faith, helping other people,” he said.

She was a student at Sterling High School when she gave birth out of wedlock to Jackson, her first child, by her married neighbor, Noah Robinson. She and Robinson never married, but Jackson has always said he considered both Robinson and his adoptive father, Charles Henry Jackson, as his fathers.

Charles Jackson died in 1979 at age 59. Noah Robinson died in 1997 at 88.

Helen Burns Jackson followed her son’s rise to international fame from her home in Greenville mostly, although she was at his side when he addressed the Democratic National Convention as a contender for the presidential nomination.

She listened to all his weekly radio broadcasts from Chicago in the early days and never missed an appearance on television, he said.

“She took lots of joy in that,” he said. “She always asked, ‘Lord what have I done to deserve this? What have I done to deserve this?’”

Although he made his home in Chicago many years ago, Jackson would come home several times a year to visit his mother.

“I’ve never lived a day without her,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine.”

A lead singer in the choir at Springfield Baptist Church, then at Long Branch, she gave up a promising career in music to raise her children, it has been said.

Greenville County Councilwoman Xanthene S. Norris was a longtime friend of Mrs. Jackson’s, and she remembers her friend’s intelligence and “lovely voice.”

But Norris, who was Jesse Jackson’s teacher and counselor at Sterling High School, also praised the work ethic that Mrs. Jackson instilled in her son.

“One thing I can say that Mrs. Jackson always taught him, that I admired in Jesse, and I still admire: Everybody else who was playing football would always have an excuse, but he would always come to me when he got ready to go on a trip,” Norris said. “He’d say, ‘Ms. Norris, I’m going to be out of town. What is my assignment?’ Most football guys didn’t do that. And it was because he had a mother who revered the idea of being good academically and also to be able to play football.”

When Jesse Jackson was about 9 years old, she started cosmetology school. She opened a shop on Anderson Street and continued plying that trade until she retired.

“She helped a lot of people,” Jackson said. “That’s mostly what I remember about Mother is some people would call and say ‘I need my hair to be dressed but I don’t have any money.’ She would say ‘come on anyhow.’ She was into that.”

Her kindness to others was sometimes repaid in unexpected ways.

Jackson said one of his favorite memories of Christmas was one year, coming home from a Christmas pageant and finding six bags of groceries on the porch. The family was so poor at the time that they didn’t even have any Christmas gifts.

The Jacksons didn’t know where the food had come from until later, when a World War I veteran who couldn’t read or write told them they were from him. He had left them to thank Mrs. Jackson for helping him fill out papers.

Her cooking was legendary. The pungent aroma of collard greens often filled the house off Lowndes Hill Road where she lived in her later years.

Jackson has vivid childhood memories of the sacrifices his mother made for him and his brother, Noah.

“I remember so well Mama and my grandmamma going to work up there on the hill, sometimes with stockings with runs in them so that my brother would have matching socks,” he said.

“These were values that insulated us,” he said. “They didn’t isolate us. They were values that insulated us.”

“I think what impresses me is I think she wanted maybe three things in life,” Jackson said. “She wanted her soul to be saved. She wanted my brother and I to grow up and have an education. Everything else was surplus.”