Thousands of mourners of the late Reverend Jesse Jackson packed inside the House of Hope Chicago church, to say farewell to the civil rights icon on Friday. The church was brimming with dignitaries, including former Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joseph Biden, as well as former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and a host of other local, state and federal leaders.
But in the crowd, stood retired Sgt. Major Hal P. McKinley of Indianapolis, Indiana, who came to pay his personal respect to the man he called “an inspiration.”
“I had to be here, first because Jesse Jackson was a friend of my father’s back in Gary, Indiana,” said McKinley in an interview with Military.com. The retired military solider recalled hearing Jackson speak as a young man. “To hear him say, ‘I am somebody.’ To hear him say, ‘keep hope alive’ at a time when I was growing up in Gary where there was no hope. I had to be here for no other reason than to say ‘thank you.’”
McKinley ended his military career with the 377th Theater Sustainment Command of New Orleans, Louisiana, and now pastors the Indianapolis church, My Father’s House C.O.G.I.C. He says that at every step of his journey, Reverend Jackson offered hope and support indirectly.
“He was a friend of everyone,” said McKinley. “But I know he was a friend of the soldier, especially because he told us ‘you can be great, you are somebody’ and that we didn’t get here on our own. Jesse said, ‘You can make it, you can do it,’ and I did.”
At the service, named “the People’s Celebration,” dignitaries eulogized Jackson as a giant.
“He ran for the presidency of the United States of America. I had just graduated from college during his first campaign,” recalled former President Obama in his remarks at the service chronicled by Military.com. “Plenty of people were dismissing Jesse’s chances. The message he sent to a 22-year-old child of a single mother with a funny name, an outsider, was that maybe there wasn’t any place, any room, where we didn’t belong.”
Former President Clinton shared a visit he and Jackson paid to a group of at risk high school students in the 1990’s.
“Jesse gets up in front of this crowd of kids and said, “You cannot take this achievement and throw it away on drugs,” remembered Clinton. “Jesse Jackson looked at these kids and said you have to ‘open your brains and not your veins.’ I thought to myself no matter how long I live or how long I stay in politics, I may never have a line that good.”
Later in the service, former Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman, first African American woman and first South Asian woman to be elected to the position, said Jackson inspired her to push beyond the status quo.
“As a child, I was raised that when you see a closed door, you must knock and wait to be invited in. But life has taught me that if that invitation is not offered, and if that door remains shut even after repeated attempts to knock on said door, sometimes you have no choice but just to kick that door open,” she said to a round of applause. “Reverend Jackson, was impatient. He did not waste time waiting, even when the doors in front of him were barred and bolted.”
Sgt. McKinley said Jackson’s powerful presence, his community organizing, and his sheer determination to make life better for people from all walks of life, will be missed.
“I told my church that I pastor in Indiana, you have to know those iconic leaders so that you can connect the dots, because it was really not that long ago that we lost Dr. King,” said McKinley. “He was there when Dr. King passed, I can say I was there when Jesse passed.”
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