Watch FRONTLINE’s 2008 Interview with Jesse Jackson

When FRONTLINE was producing the 2008 installment of “The Choice,” its election-year series profiling the two major-party presidential candidates, one of the interviewees was the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Following Jackson’s death at age 84, FRONTLINE is publishing that extended video interview with the civil rights leader for the first time.

Jackson’s interview centered on the candidacy of Barack Obama, the first Black major-party presidential nominee. Jackson, who had made his own historic bid for the Democratic presidential nomination two decades earlier, saw Obama as running “perhaps the last leg” of a decades-long race.

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The Choice 2008

October 14, 2008

“This is the result of 54 years of marches and martyrs and jailings and these fights,” Jackson said in the interview with producer Jim Gilmore, who was part of the team led by director Michael Kirk that made The Choice 2008, a dual biography of Obama and the Republican nominee, John McCain. “From Emmett Till to Dr. King to Barack shows America’s growth, America’s maturity, and the world’s response to it.”

Jackson added that he wished his mentor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. could have witnessed Obama’s political rise.

Jackson also reflected on the journey from the civil rights era to the present, saying, “We all look amazingly similar in the dark” and sharing his belief that “America has this vast potential to be better.”

Watch FRONTLINE’s 2008 interview with Jesse Jackson on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel now.