Aloha and Namaste everyone and welcome to Im Politics with John Heilman, a puck and

Odyssey joint featuring lively in-depth conversations with the people who cruise the corridors

of power in America, sculpting and shaping the ebb and flow of our politics and culture.

One of the first genuinely electrifying political moments that I ever witnessed in person

took place in July of 1988 when I sat way up in the rafters of the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta,

just a couple seats away from a trying and failing to keep a low profile John F. Kennedy Jr.

Watching Jesse Lewis Jackson, Sr., deliver his famous Keep Up Alive speech at the Democratic

National Convention, a speech that not only left a lasting mark on my psyche, but on the psyche

of the country as a whole on millions of people, white and black alike, suddenly presented

with an image they had never really been able to conjure before the image of an African-American

who could plausibly have been a major party presidential nominee and therefore could have

plausibly been president of the United States. When we lost Reverend Jackson earlier this week at the age of 84, there was only one person

I really wanted to have on the show to discuss his life and legacy, Reverend Al Sharpton,

who almost certainly knew Jackson longer and better than anyone outside of his family.

The two men first met in 1968 when Jackson was 26 and Sharpton was just 13 in the following year in the wake of

the assassination of Martin Luther King. Sharpton went on to work for Jackson as the youth director

of the New York chapter of Operation Breadbasket. Just as MLK effectively handed the baton

of the leadership of the civil rights movement to Jackson. Jackson later handed it to

Sharpton, serving as his guide, taskmaster, mentor, and father figure. Sharpton and I got into all of that

when we sat down this week for a conversation that was at once broad and deep, laced through with

large-scale historical perspective, nuanced political analysis, and intimate personal reflection.

Exactly the kind of talk that I wanted to have, that Jackson's stature and significance merited,

...