This is an LA Times Studios podcast.

Hi, I'm Faith Pinot from LA Times Studios in New York City.

I really can't think of any single individual who's had more influence after Dr. King's tenure year.

Activist, minister, and politician, Reverend Jesse Jackson, died Tuesday morning at 84 years old,

peacefully in his Chicago home, surrounded by his family.

He survived by Jacqueline, his wife, and his six children.

Jesse Jackson's family said, quote, our father was a servant leader, not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world.

A mama was not supposed to make it, and I was not supposed to make it.

You see, I was born a teenage mother, who was born their teenage mother.

Every one of these funny labels they put on you, those of you

who are watching this broadcast tonight in the projects on the corners, I understand, call

your outcast, low down, you can't make it, you're nothing, you're from nobody, subclass,

underclass, when you see Jesse Jackson,

when my name goes in nomination, your name goes in nomination.

I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me.

And it wasn't born in you, and you can make it.

Jackson was an honor student, and after high school, he turned down a contract to pitch

for the Chicago White Sox, instead taking a football scholarship at the University of Illinois

Urbana-Champaign. During Christmas break, he came home to Greenville, South Carolina, eager

with a book list in hand. But after a librarian

at the McBee Avenue color branch sent him to the White Library downtown, he was turned away by

police and told the books would take six days to pull from the shelves. When he offered to get them

...