Remembering Jesse Jackson’s Poetic Synthesis 

Reverend Jesse Jackson surprised me during a trip to his home state of South Carolina. He asked that I join him in the hospital room of his dying mother, Helen Burns Jackson. I had accompanied him in 2015 to write about his pushing then-governor Nikki Haley to accept Medicaid expansion funds from Barack Obama’s administration and to remove the Confederate flag from government property. When his mother became ill, he made more frequent trips to Greenville, always tying them to a political purpose.