From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lehrer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Thursday, February 29th.

Last week on the show, we did a Black History Month segment appropriate for this presidential election year.

We look back on the first

campaign of an African American for the nomination for president from a major U.S. political party.

It was Shirley Chisholm's campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1972.

Today we look back to what we might consider the next major chapter in that story, Reverend Jesse Jackson's

campaigns for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1988, which got much further than Congresswoman

Chisholm's did. In fact, in that 1988 campaign, Reverend Jackson came in second in the number

of delegates earned in the Democratic

primaries. That means he got more delegates than Al Gore, who also ran that year, and it means he

got more delegates than Joe Biden, who also ran that year. In 84, Jackson had come in third

behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart, but still won hundreds of delegates and a speaking

slot at the Democratic Convention. This is not a perfect party. We are not a perfect people,

yet we are called to a perfect mission. Our mission to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to house the homeless, to teach

the illiterate, to provide jobs for the jobless, and to choose the human race over the

nuclear race.

Reverend Jesse Jackson at the 1984 Democratic National Convention.

We'll hear at least one more clip as we go.

And as we welcome now, Clarence Lusane, director of the International Affairs Program

at Howard University, past chair of the Political Science department there, and author of many books,

...