Jesse Jackson joined MLK at St. Helena retreats. Hilton Head man was their driver
The Lowcountry of South Carolina was an early and important stop in the long journey of Rev. Jesse Jackson, the two-time presidential candidate and Civil Rights Movement leader who died Tuesday.
Between 1964-67, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization that used nonviolence to fight racial segregation, held five retreats at St. Helena Island’s Penn Center.
Jackson, King’s fiery protege who headed SCLS’s economic program in Chicago, was often with him. So were other top lieutenants such as Andrew Young, who later become the mayor of Atlanta and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and John Lewis, the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who would go on to serve in Congress.
Thomas C. Barnwell of Hilton Head Island, a young staff member of Penn Center at the time, remembers them all. It was his job to drive the men, who would become giants in the Civil Rights Movement, from the Savannah airport to Penn Center, where they would rest and craft the strategies necessary to change the nation. King would sit in the front seat of the Volkswagen Microbus, sometimes chatting with Barnwell, with Jackson and the others sitting in the back.
Jackson died Tuesday in Chicago. He was 84. He had been suffering from a rare neurodegenerative condition known as progressive supranuclear palsy and was previously diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
Barnwell, now 90, was a witness to history. In retrospect, he considers it a privilege to have been in the presence “of fantastic persons who have helped to improve the quality of life for America.” But back then, Barnwell says, transporting King’s staff was just a part of a normal day for him.
“During that time, the late Jesse Jackson was a staff person, just like Andrew Young and John Lewis and all the other persons who were part of the staff,” he says.
At Penn, King composed many of his speeches, including his “I Have a Dream” speech, which he wrote while staying in the Hastings Gantt cottage. King practiced the address at nearby Brick Baptist Church. Plans for a mass demonstration in Washington, D.C., to protest poverty — which became known as the March on Washington — also were finalized at Penn.
Rev. Jesse Jackson stands up for democracy
Robert Adams, Penn Center’s executive director, noted that Jackson worked closely with King “so he would have been here during the SCLC retreats King held here.”
Jackson was from Greenville, S.C., Adams noted, even though many people associated him with Chicago where he spent most of his adult life.
“Jesse Jackson is another example of the tradition of South Carolina producing great civil rights leaders who fought not just for their people but fought for American democracy in general,” Adams said.
Jackson, Adams said, followed in the footsteps of the likes of Robert Smalls of Beaufort, a slave who was elected to the state Legislature, where he authored legislation providing for the first free public school system in the country, and later Congress, and Poinsette Clark of Charleston, who developed the literacy and citizenship workshops that played a vital rote in the Civil Rights Movement.
Jackson visited Penn Center at least four times, Adams said. One famous photograph taken in 1965 shows Jackson with King and singer and activist Joan Baez.
Jackson was an activist from a young age and considered it a duty to ensure equality for all, Adams said. It was only appropriate that he would come to Penn Center, which had been serving that same mission since 1862. The 50-acre center is a former school for newly freed African Americans that served as a safe meeting place the SCLC in the 1960s. Adams called Jackson’s death “a great loss.”
“Hopefully new generations will be inspired by his work and step up to make American democracy what it should be,” Adams said.
During their visits to the region, SCLC leaders like Jackson often visited Abe Grant’s Abe’s Native Island Shrimp House on Hilton Head. Jackson, Grant once told the Island Packet, would come to the back door, announcing he wanted the usual: a large fried flounder and lemonade.
Standing up for ‘Smokin’ Joe Frazier
Jackson’s ties to the Lowcountry also include boxing great “Smokin’ Joe Frazier,” a native of Beaufort.
At Frazier’s 2011 funeral in Philadelphia, the city Frazier adopted after leaving Beaufort as a teenager, Jackson presided. And he took the opportunity to chide the city of Brotherly Love for having a statue of the fictitious boxer “Rocky” rather than Frazier, a real heavyweight champion and one of the city’s greatest sporting figures.
This story was originally published February 17, 2026 at 12:15 PM.
