Today's march for a Greenville County holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. is part of a broader push for equality in South Carolina and the South, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said Friday.

The effort will include coordinated voter registration efforts and calls for greater economic and educational opportunity for all, he said.

Jackson, a Greenville native now based in Chicago, said in a meeting with The State's editorial board that the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the organization he founded, will expand its efforts in his native state in the coming months to tackle the "unfinished business" of the struggle for freedom for all Americans.

The Rainbow/PUSH Coalition recently opened an office in Greenville and plans to add several more around the state, Jackson said, including one in Columbia. PUSH is an acronym for People United to Serve Humanity, an organization Jackson founded in 1971.

Jackson said the coalition's efforts "have never stopped, really," but that he hoped to build on the assortment of churches, civil rights organizations and individuals who have rallied around the King holiday issue in Greenville. Organizers have said they expect as many as 5,000 marchers for today's event to protest the county's lack of a permanent paid holiday honoring King.

"We're going to be doing a lot more work here in South Carolina and across the South," Jackson said. "Just kind of coming to grips with some basic issues in this state that should rally people, from Charleston to Rock Hill, that should in fact lend themselves to black and white coalition-building, to male and female coalition-building. Some of the issues will become hot and controversial because they will challenge the culture as we know it."

The issues themselves are wide-ranging. They include the Greenville holiday fight and Jackson's objections to the hiring of Mike Shula as head coach of the University of Alabama football team over a more experienced minority candidate.

Jackson, who was in Alabama speaking against the hiring Thursday, said he also will focus on finding ways to expand economic and educational opportunity for all Americans.

The common theme, Jackson said, is the need to build on the U.S. Supreme Court decision 49 years ago this month outlawing segregated public schools. He said the first three stages of the "freedom struggle" for African-Americans were the end of legal slavery, the end of segregation and obtaining the right to vote.

He said the fourth stage, the one African-Americans are in now, is the struggle for access to capital.

"Do blacks own a single plant in this state?" he asked. "We've been almost completely locked out of the economy."

Of the 71,547 manufacturing plants with paid employees in the state in 1997, 60 were owned by African-Americans, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Those 60 plants had 546 employees.

Part of Jackson's agenda is clearly political. The two-time Democratic presidential candidate said the Bush administration is "the most closed-door, ideologically driven White House we've seen in 70 years."

The last governor's race in South Carolina, Jackson said, was decided by 40,000 votes and yet 400,000 African-Americans were not registered to vote. He said too few people understand that voting matters.

Republican Gov. Mark Sanford defeated Democrat Jim Hodges by 64,282 votes, according to the state Election Commission.

"We're losing too many significant races by the margin of despair," he said. "We're trying to give them the inspiration, the reasons to vote."