Nelson Mandela is still in our hearts, says Jesse Jackson

The words from one of the leading lights of the global civil rights movement, the Rev Jesse Jackson, as he broke news of Nelson Mandela's death during a visit to the West Midlands.

He announced the former South African president's death to a shocked audience in Birmingham at a dinner celebrating 50 years since the Great March on Washington.

Just hours earlier, the 72-year-old baptist minister had been at Walsall College where he had praised the Black Country as the "fulfilment of the dream" of the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Junior.

Visibly emotional at East End Foods in Aston, Rev Jackson told 200 guests: "I'm sad to announce Nelson Mandela is dead." The words were met with gasps of shock.

"We have lost a transformer. The bad news is we have lost him, but the good news is we still have so much of him in our hearts."

He said that Mr Mandela had "taught us to build a more perfect society, upon hope and healing, not hate".

"We must pick up the baton where he dropped it," he added, saying the world must be "free of war, racism and poverty".

It is poverty that Rev Jackson now sees as one of the great obstacles to Dr King's famous dream becoming a reality.

As a little boy in Greenville, South Carolina, Jesse Jackson was made to sit at the back of a bus because of the colour of his skin.

Decades later he is greeted the world over as a hero of the civil rights movement.

He once worked with Dr King, the man whose "I have a dream" speech 50 years ago set out the ambition of black children and white children in America being able to play together.

At Walsall College, where he spoke less than three hours before learning of Mr Mandela's death, the 72-year-old looked around the room and saw the next stage of that – people of different colours and religions hanging on his every word in a college where they're all learning together.

It possibly helped that Rev Jackson's tall and broad frame, the build of an American football quarterback, made him stand out and cut a commanding figure.

As a key player in the civil rights organisation, Rev Jackson was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Dr King was shot dead in April 1968.

He was one of the last people to speak to him. The night before, Dr King had given another famous speech in which he said "I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you".

But Dr King probably never expected to hear that his dream was being fulfilled thousands of miles away in Walsall.

There is no separation of black and white children for school, no colour bars anymore.

A few miles away in Smethwick it is unthinkable that 50 years ago the council tried to buy up houses in Marshall Street and keep them for whites only.

And yet Rev Jackson, who twice tried to be the Democrat challenger for the presidency of the United States, believes there is still more for the civil rights movement to achieve.

He read an Express & Star feature on Marshall Street, surrounding the whites only policy and the ensuing visit made in 1965 by another American civil rights campaigner, Malcolm X, with interest and asked if he could keep it.

"In 50 years some things have changed," he said. "We no longer have a lack of access to public amenities and housing. We have the right to vote.

"Today, we are free but not equal."

The issue now, Rev Jackson said, is not one of different cultures but of poverty.

He is particularly scathing of Oxford and Cambridge universities.

"Twenty-one of their colleges took no black students last year," he said. "One has not had a black in five years. That's vertical segregation."

But Rev Jackson has no desire to see "positive discrimination" used to boost the number of people getting into such universities because they are black.

"I want positive access, positive entry, not discrimination," he said. "If someone's been on the highway for 300 years and another group wants to join, that's not discrimination, it's access.

"Discrimination is about being picked out, not about making things open."

He described how people have learned to "survive apart" and still have to learn to live together.

"When Manchester United and Chelsea play football, there are blacks and whites on the team together.

"That's because they're playing on a field that's even with rules that apply to all of them and clear goals. The problem is beyond that, in the stands, where people call each other nasty names.

"So we've made progress but we still have work to do."

He returned to the theme of elite universities – he gave a speech to the Oxford Union a few days ago – to suggest that privilege will continue to breed privilege.

"Kids go to their nice private day care schools, they take exams that prepare them for entry to the top universities and their parents can afford to send them," he says.

"The poorer kids don't have the same development. It's locking people out."

But while the preacher painted a picture of a struggle for equality that is still on decades after Dr King outlined his dream, he saw it as reality in parts of Britain, including at Walsall College, where he was a guest of Labour MP Valerie Vaz.

Addressing the crowd, made up of people of different backgrounds and religions, he said: "Dr King would be proud to see you tonight. You represent the fulfilment of that dream.

"I'm just an old country preacher, passing through town tonight. God bless you guys."