Where does Barack Obama’s historic 2008 presidential campaign fit into the long history of the civil rights movement?

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 in February at age 84, on this episode of The FRONTLINE Dispatch, we’re listening back to the extended interview with the civil rights leader, which we have published 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.

“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.”

You can also watch FRONTLINE’s 2008 interview with Jesse Jackson on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel now.