The Greenville Eight

Jesse Jackson, only about five years older than Trump, grew up in an era when the other children in his school taunted him for being born out of wedlock.

He sat in the back of the bus, not just metaphorically but literally. He drank out of water fountains marked "colored." He grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, but attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a football scholarship.

In 1960, when he was 19, he came home on Christmas break and, like freshmen everywhere, left a lot of work to do until the last minute. The book he needed to finish a paper was not at the "colored" library in Greenville but was at the Greenville Public Library.

So Jackson walked in, but a policeman walked him out. It may have been 1960 elsewhere in America, but in the Jim Crow South, it was still 1892.

And Jackson did a most unexpected thing. No, not marching on the library. That came later. And no, not getting the law changed to make the reading facilities in town open to all. That, too, would come later.

What Jackson did upon being tossed out of that library was cry. Real, bitter tears. He was not afraid; he was a freshman quarterback for a Big Ten football team, so he wasn't afraid of many people.

It was not fear. It was just the shame of the whole thing. The water fountains and the seats on the bus and even what book you were allowed to read.

His tears dried up. And Jackson went to work. In a few months, he and seven other black students returned to the whites-only library, got books, took seats, sat down and read.

About 20 minutes later, they were handcuffed, and they were jailed for 45 minutes.

"In the paper write-up about our arrest, I remember them calling us leftists," Jackson would say later. "We weren't left; we were right." A small joke.

The library closed and reopened two months later as an integrated facility.

On the 50th anniversary, the Greenville Eight held a reunion. Only four members of the original eight showed up, but that was OK. It made the speeches shorter.

"Somehow we all finished college," Jackson said, "and went on to replace old walls with new bridges."

-- Roger Simon, Midweek, March 16, 2016