Originally published in Synapse on January 22, 2009.
The chain of events that began on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 and culminate on the steps of the Capitol in Washington this week took more than a half century to unfold. The history connecting Rosa Parks to Barack Obama, from the mother of the civil rights movement to the ascension to the presidency of its most perfect child, has been an extraordinary period in the ever-unfolding story of the United States of America.
For make no mistake, without the long struggle for equality launched in Montgomery in the late 1950s, a bus boycott led by a young preacher named Martin King, there is no Obama presidency. When he and his wife, Michelle, stride down Pennsylvania Avenue, they follow in the footsteps of all who took part in the Civil Rights Movement, a long struggle that is by no means over.
Obama’s triumphal moment is an appropriate time to remember the heroes and martyrs who began the struggle in the deep South in the ‘50s and ‘60s and carried it all over America. It is a time to remember the dogs and fire hoses and church bombings in Birmingham, the bloody events of Selma, the murders in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and the ordeal of the Freedom Riders. It is time to recall once again the great march on Washington and King’s famous speech about his dream.
As Obama takes the oath of office, it is worth remembering the performance of his presidential predecessors. After some foot-dragging, John F. Kennedy became the first American president to give a pro civil rights speech, when he went before the nation in 1963 and said, “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, embraced civil rights more enthusiastically than any president before or since. He pushed through Congress the historic Civil Rights Bill of 1964, and the even-more significant Voting Rights Act of 1965.
These two acts largely broke the back of official segregation in the South. But they did not bring racial equality to America. Even as civil rights legislation was moving through Congress, signs of a white backlash were growing. In 1964, Californians went to the polls to overwhelmingly repeal the Rumford Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in housing.
Faced with such white intransigence, it took little to ignite the seething racial tensions, and in the summer of 1965, a riot in Watts triggered what would be a succession of race riots in American cities in the summers of the 19605: Detroit and Newark would be the bloodiest. In 1968, Richard Nixon was elected to the White House by pursuing his “Southern strategy.”
Under this, Republicans shed their historic role as the party of Lincoln and embraced southern whites. The Nixon administration announced that it would treat African Americans with “benign neglect” — the days of active support for civil rights from the executive branch were over. Much of the action in the 1970s shifted to the courts. A series of court-ordered busing plans to integrate schools stirred furious white resistance in the north.
One of the hottest spots was Boston, ironically the cradle of abolitionism in the previous century. But times had changed, and charged racist feelings elevated busing foe Louise Day Hicks from obscurity to the brink of the governor’s mansion. But undoubtedly the politician who rode the white backlash most successfully was Ronald Reagan.
Famously starting his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., site of the murder of three civil rights workers in the ‘60s, Reagan sent racists an unmistakable message by choosing this spot to give a speech defending states’ rights, long a code phrase for white supremacy. And despite being the president who signed the bill making Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday, Reagan remained cool to the legacy of Dr. King, suggesting on more than one occasion that King was a communist.
Through great good fortune, Obama spend much of his youth in Hawaii; no racial paradise, as he makes clear in his book Dreams of My Father, but far advanced in its racial attitudes compared to many parts of America at the time. And Obama was also fortunate in the timing of his birth: his generation of African Americans, while still facing formidable barriers, also had opportunities that had been largely unavailable to previous generations of Black Americans, opportunities made possible by the successes of the Civil Rights Movement.
In particular, Obama received a first-rate education, traditionally a reliable route for overcoming barriers in America. From his elite prep school in Hawaii to Columbia and Harvard in the Ivy League, Obama has had ample opportunity to demonstrate that he belongs among the best and the brightest.
As Obama grew into manhood, his achievements piled up steadily: first African American to be president of the Harvard Law Review; best-selling author with Dreams of My Father; a successful political career, which was catapulted to national attention by his keynote address to the Democratic Convention in 2004. (“I know no red states or blue states, I know only the United States of America!”) Then came his seemingly quixotic quest for the presidency. Even this built on Black pioneers before him; Rep. Shirley Chisholm and the Rev. Jesse Jackson had made presidential runs before.
Obama was given no chance when he started, but as his voice was heard (Yes, we can!), America increasingly responded. The groundswell of grass-roots support carried Obama all the way through Election Day and his memorably triumphant rally in Chicago’s Grant Park that night.
And so this week, the man and the moment meet. An African American, Barack Obama, stands at the pinnacle of political power. A movement that rescued a race from powerlessness stands looking over his shoulder with pride. And another chapter of the American Dream unfolds...
