House Speaker Mike Johnson, citing past precedent, denied a request on Friday from the family of the late Rev. Jesse Jackson for the civil rights icon to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.
Johnson’s office said the request was denied because that designation is typically reserved for select officials, including former presidents and military leaders.
A Republican source told NBC News that the speaker’s decision was not political and noted that requests for former Vice President Dick Cheney and Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk to lie in honor were also denied.
On Sunday, the Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network and an MS NOW host, criticized Johnson’s refusal to honor his mentor, noting that Congress previously bucked precedent when it allowed the Rev. Billy Graham, a Baptist evangelist, to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol in 2018.
“And they should have, because he was a spiritual leader that really made a difference in terms of the religious life of many millions of Americans,” Sharpton told MS NOW’s “The Weekend.”
Other civilians who have had the distinction of lying in honor at the Capitol include civil rights hero Rosa Parks in 2005, and Capitol Police officers Jacob Chestnut Jr. and John Gibson, who were both killed in the line of duty in 1998.
Sharpton told MS NOW that he believes Jackson “belongs on that list” because the late civil rights leader and former presidential candidate gave hope to millions of Americans “that they could achieve things that were unachievable before.”
“If there was anyone in our time that deserved that exception, it would have been Jesse Jackson,” Sharpton said.
Sharpton said the Republican’s denial insulted not only Jackson’s wife, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, whom the “Politics Nation” host called the “strongest woman” he’s ever seen, but “the millions of Americans across the rainbow — white, Black, Asian and others — that found hope in him,” including Sharpton himself.
“I met him when I was 12 years old,” he explained. “I became his youth director in New York under Rev. William Jones. At 13, I was in the hood on welfare. He taught me I was somebody.”
“We did not just discover legislation with him,” Sharpton continued. “We discovered hope and possibilities and our potential in him, and that should have been crystallized by him laying in state at the nation’s Capitol.”
You can watch Sharpton’s full remarks in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”