There is a moment in every young person’s life when they encounter someone who makes them believe that the world can be different—that they can be different—and nothing is ever the same again. For me, that moment came because of my mother.
I was twelve years old when my mother brought me to Reverend William Augustus Jones, the great pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Reverend Jones was one of the towering figures of the Black church in New York—a prophetic voice, a man of scripture and struggle. My mother saw something in me that she wanted shaped by serious men. Reverend Jones saw it too. And so, he did what serious men of God do when they recognize a spark: he passed it along. He introduced me to Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson Sr.
I was a boy. Jesse Jackson was already a force of nature.
He was young himself, by the standards of movement leadership, but he carried himself with a gravitas that seemed ancient, as if he had been forged in some furnace the rest of us hadn’t yet been near. He spoke, and you did not merely hear words. You felt the architecture of history rearranging itself. I remember standing in that room thinking: This is what a leader sounds like. This is what it looks like when a man has decided, without reservation or apology, that his people’s liberation is worth everything he has.
Jesse had already shown me what it looked like to stand somewhere you were not invited, to refuse the limits other people set for you.
I became the youth director of Operation Breadbasket in New York not long after that. Jesse had built Operation Breadbasket as the economic arm of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Operation Breadbasket was a campaign to use the organized moral weight of the Black community to demand jobs, demand dignity, demand that American commerce reckon with the people it had spent centuries exploiting. As a teenager running the youth division in New York, I was learning in the most serious school I could have attended. Jesse Jackson was the professor, and the streets of America were the classroom.
What I did not fully appreciate at the time—though I came to understand it deeply as I grew older—was how much Jesse’s effectiveness flowed from his formation in the Black church. He was not a politician who occasionally used religious language. He was a preacher who understood that the prophetic tradition of the Black church was itself a form of political power, perhaps the most durable political power Black Americans had ever possessed. The church had been our refuge and our launching pad, our sanctuary and our strategy room. Jesse never allowed those two realities to be separated. When he stood at a pulpit or a podium, there was no seam between the sacred and the civic. They were one fabric, and he wore it without apology and without confusion.
That integration of faith and action—that insistence that the gospel had social and economic and political consequences that you were obligated to pursue in the world—is something I carry with me every single day. Every Saturday morning at National Action Network (NAN), when the people come and we lift our voices and then we talk about the work ahead, I am drawing from a well that Jesse helped dig.
When Jesse later built Operation PUSH in Chicago, his Saturday morning rallies became something historic. A sanctuary full of people—working people, activists, clergy, young folks who needed somewhere to put their energy—coming together every week to hold power accountable and lift each other up. When I founded NAN decades later, I modeled our own Saturday morning action rallies in Harlem directly after what Jesse was doing in Chicago. I make no apologies for that. You learn from the best, and you build on what they built. That is not imitation; that is lineage. I stand in the direct line that runs from Dr. King to Jesse Jackson to the work we do at NAN today, and I have never once been embarrassed to say so. That lineage is not a burden. It is an honor.
Jesse understood that, too. When he came to Harlem and stood inside our headquarters, he looked around at what we had built—the staff, the history on those walls, the community that had grown up around that building—and he named it himself. He called it “The House of Justice.” That name stayed, because that is exactly what Jesse Jackson spent his entire life trying to build: not monuments, not legacies in the self-congratulatory sense, but actual houses of justice, places where ordinary people could walk in off the street and find someone willing to fight for them.
What people sometimes forget—especially those who encountered Jesse only on television, only in the grand arena of presidential politics—is how practical he was. “Keep hope alive” was not a slogan manufactured in some consultant’s office—it was a theology, a survival strategy, a direct instruction to people who had every reason to give up. Jesse meant it. He lived it.
But the preaching was always in service of the program. This is what I absorbed as a young man watching him work: that the sermon and the strategy had to be one. You could not inspire people on Sunday and leave them without a plan on Monday. Operation Breadbasket understood this. PUSH understood this. His two presidential campaigns, in 1984 and 1988, understood this. When Jesse stood before those Democratic National Conventions and spoke about the suffering of farmers in Iowa and steelworkers in Gary, Indiana, and sharecroppers in Mississippi and young Black men in Chicago in the same breath, he was not being rhetorical. He was building a coalition. He was insisting, years before it became fashionable to say so, that the poor and the working people of every color in this country had more in common with each other than with the powerful interests that pitted them against one another.
I watched him take on the Democratic establishment when it was not comfortable to do so. I watched him go to Syria in 1983 to secure the release of Lieutenant Robert Goodman—a Black naval aviator shot down over Lebanese territory—when the Reagan administration had essentially written the man off. Jesse came home with Lieutenant Goodman. He did not ask permission. He did not wait for the diplomatic machinery to grind forward at its own indifferent pace. He went, because that is who Jesse Jackson was: a man who understood that moral authority, deployed with courage, could accomplish what institutional power would not bother to attempt.
I think about that mission often. I think about what it meant to a young Al Sharpton, watching a Black preacher from Greenville, South Carolina—a man born outside of wedlock, who had known poverty and humiliation, who had been shaped by the church and by the movement and by his own relentless hunger to matter—walk into one of the most complex geopolitical situations in the world and walk back out with an American serviceman. It told me something about the power of moral seriousness. It told me that race did not have to be a ceiling. It told me that if you carried yourself with enough conviction, if your cause was righteous and your preparation thorough, you could sit at any table, walk through any door.
Jesse Jackson taught me that the measure of a leader is not the offices he holds but the doors he opens for others.
Jesse gave a generation of us that belief.
He is why I ran for political office. He is why I founded the National Action Network. He is why, when people told me that a Black activist from Brooklyn had no business being on a presidential debate stage in 2004, I stood there anyway. Because Jesse had already shown me what it looked like to stand somewhere you were not invited, to refuse the limits other people set for you, and to expand what was imaginable for everyone who came behind you.
But I want to say something about the man behind the movement, because history sometimes flattens people into their greatest hits and forgets what made them human. Jesse Jackson was funny. He could read a room and find the exact line that would break the tension and bring a crowd together in laughter before he brought them back to seriousness. He was warm in private, in ways that the public Jesse—the Jesse of the podium, the Jesse of the picket line—did not always reveal. He was a man who asked after your family, who remembered details about your life that you had mentioned once in passing, who understood that relationships were the infrastructure of movements. You cannot sustain a lifetime of struggle without people around you who genuinely love you and whom you genuinely love in return. Jesse had that. He cultivated it. He knew that the long work of justice was not a solo performance but a communal vocation, and he treated the people in his circle accordingly.
I also want to say something about his resilience, because Jesse Jackson faced criticism—some of it fair, some of it wildly unfair—across every decade of his public life. He was attacked from the right for being too radical and from certain precincts of the left for not being radical enough. He was scrutinized in ways that white politicians of comparable stature were simply not scrutinized. And through all of it, he kept going. He did not retreat into bitterness. He did not allow the weight of other people’s opposition to bend him away from the work. That is its own form of courage, quieter perhaps than the courage it takes to walk into a foreign capital or stand on a picket line, but no less real.
This book spans the arc of one of the most consequential careers in American public life. You will hear Jesse in many registers here: the preacher and the politician; the strategist and the dreamer; the man who ran for president twice and moved the country in the process; the elder statesman who never stopped showing up. What I hope you will take from these pages, beyond the history and the analysis, is the character of the man. The humor. The tenderness. The iron underneath the eloquence.
Jesse Jackson taught me that the measure of a leader is not the offices he holds but the doors he opens for others. By that measure, there are few in American history who stand taller.
He is gone now, and the grief is real. But so is the inheritance. And so is the obligation—the obligation to honor what he built by refusing to let it go dormant, by continuing to speak when speaking is costly, by continuing to stand in places where our presence is inconvenient to power. That is what Jesse would want from those of us he leaves behind. Not eulogies that end at the graveside, but lives that carry the work forward. Not nostalgia for what he did, but action in the spirit of why he did it.
Keep hope alive. He meant that for us. All of us.
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From Jesse Jackson: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Introduction copyright © 2026 by Al Sharpton. Available from Melville House Publishing.