CHAPTER 9

Backlash

The dream was not to put one black family in the White House, the dream was to make everything equal in everybody’s house.

—Rev. Al Sharpton, May 2, 2010

FOR THE PRESIDENT AND HIS PARTY, THE CELEBRATION OVER health-care reform’s passage was short-lived. Anger on the right over the Affordable Care Act had not ebbed, and Republicans were preparing to use it as a battering ram in the midterm elections, which were just six months away. And some of the president’s supporters worried that even as the outcry over health care took on an outwardly racial tone, the president and his team either couldn’t or wouldn’t see it, and worse, were refusing to take it on.

The vilification of health care, the hysteria over it in some quarters, seemed to be summed up in a sign hung on the door of a Mount Dora, Florida, urologist in April that read: “If you voted for Obama . . . seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years.” The doctor who hung it, Jack Cassell, was fifty-six years old, white, and relatively affluent, and as such was in the demographic median of the tea party movement. His hostility to health-care reform, and to the president who pushed for and signed it, was replicated across a wide swath of voters, including a growing majority of white baby boomers and New Dealers, who in another era would almost certainly have been Democrats. And that’s what Barack Obama’s party feared the most.

Republicans were portraying health-care reform as just another extension of LBJ-style welfare that would be abused by shiftless minorities and illegal immigrants, robbing the successful and the thrifty and consigning seniors to a bleak future by allegedly cutting Medicare (which while untrue, was particularly potent). Polls showed the narrative was having an effect. One month after the bill passed, a rising star in the Republican Party, Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia, kicked off April by reviving the state’s celebration of Confederate History Month, with nary a mention of slavery as the driving cause of the Civil War. McDonnell recanted after an uproar by the state and national NAACP, but the denunciation of health care was reflected in rising hostility toward the man in the White House, and not just in the states of the former Confederacy.

Vulnerable Democrats, rather than touting a legislative victory that had eluded their party for nearly a century, began a wholesale retreat away from both “Obamacare” and Obama himself.

Among the president’s African American supporters, some worried that the White House, flush with victory over health care and preparing to move on to the next item on the president’s agenda—a comprehensive budget agreement that would raise taxes on the wealthy and bolster the slowly rebounding economy—was ignoring the headlights of the electoral locomotive barreling toward the Democrats in November.

Ben Jealous was among those who were worried. At thirty-five, he was the youngest NAACP president in the organization’s history. Prior to holding the position, he had been many things: an NAACP voter registration volunteer, a Rhodes scholar, a reporter at a black weekly newspaper in Mississippi, the head of the black newspaper publishers association, an investment manager and prodigious fund-raiser, and at every turn, an activist.

The son of a prominent, white New England family on his father’s side and the descendants of slaves on his mother’s, Jealous could be impatient, and he was leading an organization beset with problems in need of patience, from its staid reputation and tendency toward bureaucratic responses to local crises, to an aging, dwindling membership.

He’d made his public debut as head of the NAACP at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church a month after Barack Obama’s inauguration, telling the congregation and its pastor, Rev. Calvin Butts, “I’m here like most of you with my head in the clouds of January 20 . . . but with my feet firmly planted in January 21. My generation was told that all the great battles were over. And we emerged the most murdered people in the country, and the most incarcerated group on the planet.”

Jealous, Marc Morial of the National Urban League, and Rev. Al Sharpton held their first formal meeting in the White House with the president in February, as a record snowstorm shuttered the Capitol. (Civil rights pioneer Dorothy Height, age ninety-seven, was to attend but could not make the trip due to the storm. Obama would eulogize her two months later, at Washington’s National Cathedral. He noted that Height, in her trademark brightly colored hats, had visited the White House twenty-one times and met with every president since Dwight Eisenhower.)

The three civil rights leaders had come armed with an agenda: to focus the administration on the plight of black communities, rural and urban, who were continuing to struggle, even though the nation had passed through the worst of the Great Recession. Jealous in particular believed it was imperative that the president be seen to overtly and visibly combat the economic crises facing black communities, both as a moral matter and to ensure that the president’s most ardent supporters didn’t become dispirited and disengaged, with a census year midterm looming. Though Jealous now led a nonpartisan organization, those close to him said he was a political animal, and he privately voiced frustrations to colleagues that the new president was ignoring his black and liberal base.

Black unemployment had spiked to 16.5 percent by April, even as the overall jobless rate had dropped to a still high 9.9 percent. The stimulus was beginning to work its way through the economy, but for black communities, the foreclosure and jobs crises were continuing to spiral out of control. The unemployment rate for black men that month was 20.2 percent, versus 9.6 percent for white men, so high that a coalition of advocacy groups, including the National Employment Law Project, submitted an April complaint to the United Nations.

The president surprised and perplexed some aides at the February meeting by striding into the room in a casual shirt and khakis, while his three guests were decked out in suits and ties. But Jealous, Morial, and Sharpton found his presentation was formal indeed. He firmly opposed the kind of racially targeted programs the activists and their allies in the Congressional Black Caucus wanted. Obama explained during the hour-long meeting that he believed his economic plans, including health care—which was to be broadly distributed to all struggling Americans—would especially aid black households due to their disproportionate suffering. That had been his stance since the start of his term, despite growing criticism from black writers and thinkers, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus. And he maintained it now.

Jealous, colleagues said, came away from the meeting unsatisfied, though afterward, Sharpton told the reporters assembled outside the White House, “I think he [Obama] was very clear that he was not going to engage in any race-based programs. But at the same time, he was determined that going forward we can correct some of the structural inequalities that are currently in place.” Jealous confirmed that the conversation focused less on race than on the many economically hard-hit areas of the country. “The reality is that poverty has been greatly democratized by this recession,” he said. “What all Americans have in common is that they are hurting and struggling and want to see the pace of progress quicken.”

No photos were released, however, because some African American White House aides were worried the president’s casual attire would send the wrong impression to black communities. Friends said Jealous was particularly frustrated, not by what the president wore, but by what he viewed as a lack of urgency on the president’s part, to confront either the specific economic ills of black communities or the conservative fringe that even a month before the health-care bill was signed were massing to kill it and to blunt the impact of the historic 2008 election.

If the White House wouldn’t be proactive, Jealous determined that he would, and he began pushing the NAACP, through protests and direct action and online, to do more to confront the tea party head-on—particularly after they held their second annual “tax day” rallies in April, with more than a thousand protests nationwide.

On July 10, the NAACP opened its 101st annual meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, with the delegates calling on the tea party movement to repudiate the racism within its ranks, including the offensive signs at rallies and ugly statements directed at the president online and in conservative media. Also listed were the taunts, spittle, and epithets directed at black and gay members of Congress during the ugly last walk to passage of the Affordable Care Act back in April.

In his address to the more than two thousand assembled delegates, Jealous declared that the tea party movement “must expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take full responsibility for all of their actions.”

The St. Louis Tea Party immediately responded by passing its own resolution: “We settle our disputes civilly and avoid the gutter tactic of attempting to silence opponents by inflammatory name-calling.” Also, “The very term ‘racist’ has diminished meaning due to its overuse by political partisans, including members of the NAACP.”

Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate, and a favorite of tea party groups, lashed out at the NAACP on Facebook, writing, “the charge that Tea Party Americans judge people by the color of their skin is false, appalling, and is a regressive and diversionary tactic to change the subject at hand.”

Four days later, on the morning of July 19, firebrand conservative political commentator Andrew Breitbart posted two heavily edited videos titled “Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism—2010.” It claimed that Shirley Sherrod, the director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Georgia Office of Rural Development, had admitted, during a speech at the Georgia NAACP’s 20th Annual Freedom Fund dinner on March 27, four days after President Obama signed the national health-care law, that she had discriminated against a white farmer, deciding that he should get help from “one of his own kind” and referring him to a white attorney.

The clip was immediately picked up by right-wing media, online, on talk radio, and on Fox News. The Right reveled in the opportunity to accuse an Obama administration official of hypocrisy and “reverse racism.”

The Obama administration found itself in an untenable position. With the midterms just four months away, they could ill afford to hand the tea party and the Republicans ammunition in the form of a federal staffer who appeared to have endorsed discrimination against whites, particularly with the tea party whipping up a frenzy among white voters, and particularly white seniors, over health care. And the administration had been made hypersensitive to race-related incidents by the increasingly racialized debate over the Obama presidency, from the “beer summit” to “you lie.”

Alarms were going off inside the White House personnel office. Fox News producers were calling for comment, and aides were preparing to brief President Obama on the Sherrod affair the next day. Taking no chances, and doing no due diligence, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, through staff, let Sherrod know she should resign, immediately, in the hopes that her resignation would blunt the controversy.

As news of Sherrod’s resignation broke, Speaker Newt Gingrich, during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News, praised Vilsack in loaded terms: “You know, you can’t be a black racist any more than you can be a white racist.”

The phones at the NAACP national headquarters were ringing off the hook, too. Jealous, having mounted high profile attacks on the tea party for which he and his organization were reaping the whirlwind, joined Vilsack in acting too soon. When word of Sherrod’s resignation came, with the videotape of her full remarks still making its way from Georgia to Washington via FedEx, and without speaking to her himself, Ben Jealous fired off a blistering statement joining in the condemnation of the now former USDA employee. The statement was quickly posted to the NAACP website and mailed to several journalists, and Jealous tweeted it under his personal Twitter handle.

Sherrod was angry at the Agriculture Department, at the NAACP, and at the president and his administration, whom she believed had been frightened into submission by Fox News and the right wing. She began accepting requests to be interviewed, including by CNN, where she recounted her biography and explained the full context of her remarks. Sherrod recalled growing up in Baker County, Georgia, where when she was seventeen years old, her father, a Baptist church deacon, was shot to death in 1965 by a white farmer over a livestock dispute. An all-white grand jury declined to indict the farmer, and Sherrod noted that the circumstances of her father’s death and the lack of justice that it entailed had made her initially reticent to aid the white farmer and his wife, but that she soon realized that what was important was not race, but taking the opportunity to help a fellow human being. The farmer in question, Roger Spooner, appeared on the cable network, too, with his wife, Eloise, calling Sherrod a lifelong friend who had truly saved their farm. The story had been one not of racism but of redemption.

When the full video was finally posted to the NAACP website, it had become horrifically clear that the organization, and Sherrod’s employers in Washington, had made a grave mistake.

Jealous quickly reversed course. A new statement was released, saying that after viewing the entire speech, the organization believed they had been “snookered by Fox News and Tea Party activist Andrew Breitbart” into promoting a false tale that upended the meaning of racial bias. Breitbart was still defending himself Tuesday night, saying he was simply hitting back against NAACP charges of tea party racism.

“I could care less [sic] about Shirley Sherrod,” Breitbart told Sean Hannity. “This is not about Shirley Sherrod.”

By Wednesday, Sherrod was fielding apologies, from Vilsack, from the NAACP, in qualified fashion from Bill O’Reilly, and eventually from then CNN correspondent Roland Martin, who, before the full tape was released, had also joined in the condemnation—and from the White House. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, in the daily briefing, declared: “I think without a doubt Ms. Sherrod is owed an apology. I would do so certainly on behalf of this administration.”

Vilsack publicly took the blame for the firing, indemnifying the White House and offering to bring Sherrod back. She didn’t accept.

By Thursday, the full judgment of the media descended on the White House, with the New York Times declaring: “The Obama administration has been shamed by its rush to judgment after it forced the resignation of a black midlevel official in the Agriculture Department who was wrongly accused of racism by the right-wing blogosphere.” And Sherrod herself told NBC’s Today show that she’d like to “have a conversation” with the president, “to help him understand the experiences at the grassroots level.” The conversation came that night, when Obama telephoned Sherrod.

For some in the African American community, the Sherrod affair revived the sting of Lani Guinier’s ouster during the Clinton years. Worse, it seemed to bespeak a troubling reflex within the White House to protect itself so thoroughly on racial matters, and to distance itself so instantaneously from racial conflict, that it would sooner jettison a black woman accused of racial offense than take the time to find out who she was, or to confirm what she supposedly had done. Black critics of the White House said the incident had exposed the administration’s Achilles’ heel: a dearth of personal contacts within the wider body of black politics, and an unwillingness to reach out to those old hands who might help the president and his staff know more.

“They didn’t know who [Sherrod] was,” one civil rights leader lamented. “What you had were junior staffers who heard snippets of her comments, taken out of context, and reacted based on what they heard without a clear impression. They went for the bright, broad bait.”

They should have called someone, the lament would go. They should have called John Lewis, or Vernon Jordan, who was from Georgia and had been the NAACP field director there in his younger days, or David Scott, who sat on the House Agricultural Committee. They should have picked up the phone before throwing Shirley under the bus.

But if the administration had been too quick to act and too slow to consult, so, too, had the NAACP.

Jealous flew to Albany, Georgia, and with a contingent of NAACP staff met Sherrod in the lobby of the Hilton hotel. He apologized without reservation, saying he had acted before receiving all the information.

“He pretty much came out of the NAACP president role and became a humble man,” said Larry Nesmith, head of the Coffee County, Georgia, NAACP branch, which had hosted the event at which Sherrod spoke. “He said, ‘I made a mistake, I’m sorry.’ He did it with emotion, because he knew the damage that had been done. He apologized to not only her, but to her husband as well. I really respected him for that.”

For Sherrod, forgiveness came right away. The group shared lunch at Old Times Country Buffet. They talked about fishing.

AS THE 2010 MIDTERM ELECTIONS APPROACHED, THE WHITE HOUSE was being battered by serial storms: a deepwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April, WikiLeaks’s July release of tens of thousands of classified documents on the war in Afghanistan, an ongoing humanitarian crisis following a devastating earthquake in Haiti, and a pernicious, worldwide flu pandemic in August. The last thing the Obama administration needed was a march on Washington.

Still, that’s just what the NAACP and dozens of labor and civil rights groups—the SEIU, AFL-CIO, and United Auto Workers unions, the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, the Sierra Club, the National Council of La Raza, and others—had been planning since August. They scheduled an October rally on the National Mall that they dubbed “10-2-10.” It was the kind of ground-level activism Ben Jealous hoped would propel the NAACP out of the boardroom and onto the front lines.

In some ways, the White House seemed almost to be at war with parts of its own base, or at least with what spokesman Robert Gibbs derided as the “professional left” in an August 10 interview with the Hill. A chorus of liberal critics were battering the administration over the president’s stated personal opposition to gay marriage (which few liberal activists believed was genuine), his refusal to order the military to stop enforcing the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ban on open military service for gays and lesbians, the lack of a public option in the health-care law, and the failure to close the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay. The fact that Congress had authority over the latter two matters did little to deter Obama’s critics on the left, who, Gibbs sneered, “will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare, and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon.”

Gibbs charged that those comparing Obama to George W. Bush “ought to be drug tested. I mean, it’s crazy,” he said.

But the critics, led by liberal libertarian bloggers, many of whom had opposed Obama from the start, were undeterred. They charged that Obama had not earned the continued support of liberal voters. He hadn’t done enough or fought Republicans hard enough.

The vitriol “was what I expected from the Right,” said one prominent African American leader. “I didn’t expect it from some of the liberal whites. It always amazes me, how under pressure a lot of people you thought were our friends would be the first ones to jump ship, and do it with hostility.”

Some progressives occasionally pointed out that the president’s pragmatism was necessary in an atmosphere in which Republicans had vowed total obstruction. But the story line of liberals angry with the progressive president was almost irresistible for the D.C. media.

As the election approached, it became increasingly clear that the threat of electoral rout was real. Democrats up for reelection were fleeing from the health-care law, and from the president. Conservatives, emboldened by the Shirley Sherrod dustup and leaning more aggressively than ever into the charge that the president and his allies were the embodiment of true racism, with white Americans the victims of a “gangster” president, even launched a “Rally to Restore America,” held provocatively on the date of the forty-seventh anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. Right-wing host Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Alveda King, a niece of Dr. King and an ardent conservative, declared themselves and the tea party to be the true “people of the civil rights movement.”

As Sharpton, Jealous, Marc Morial, Avis Jones-DeWeever, who had succeeded Dorothy Height at the National Council of Negro Women, Martin Luther King III, and others, flanked by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, led a five-mile “Reclaim the Dream” march from Dunbar High School in Northwest Washington in outraged response, Glenn Beck boldly declared of his 9/12 movement: “We are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights, justice, equal justice. Not special justice, not social justice. We are the inheritors and protectors of the civil rights movement. They are perverting it.”

And while the president appeared on black media outlets, and while he and the First Lady barnstormed the country in the late summer and fall, calling on African Americans and women to vote to defend the gains of the previous year and a half, it was apparent that the election of 2010 would be nothing like 2008.

Speaking at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual legislative conference gala on September 18, President Obama acknowledged that “a lot of people may not be feeling that energized or that engaged right now,” but he implored the members and their constituents to “go back to your neighborhoods, to go back to your workplaces, to go to churches, and go to the barbershops, and go to the beauty shops, and tell them we’ve got more work to do.”

The White House enlisted Bill Clinton to rally support among Democrats, too, and the former president dutifully hit the road, but it wasn’t enough.

Democrats suffered a fulsome defeat, made to sting more by the fact that it was a census year, with not just the legislatures and governorships and congressional seats on the line, but also a decade of redistricting, with its power to cement Republican House and statehouse majorities for a decade.

Republicans retook the House, picking up sixty-three seats and snatching the speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi’s hands. In the Senate, Republicans grabbed five seats, leaving Democrats with a slim majority. Republicans grabbed a half dozen swing state governorships, including Florida and Ohio, and the GOP finally completed its takeover of every southern legislature.

House Democrats lost white voters by 24 points, where their losing margin had been just 4 points in 2006, at the nadir of George W. Bush’s popularity. Winning 9 in 10 black voters, 7 in 10 Hispanics, and 6 in 10 Asian Americans was not enough in a shrunken midterm electorate that was all but devoid of the younger, more racially diverse voters who helped put Obama in the White House.

Instead, facing a smaller, older electorate, Democrats posted their worst performance with white voters since World War II.

For African Americans, the election was tantamount to political Armageddon. As David Bositis, then the lead researcher on the black electorate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, would later write, the election ushered in the “resegregation of southern politics,” all but completing “the 46-year transition from a multiracial Democratic political dominance to a white conservative Republican political dominance.”

Racially polarized voting meant that, particularly in the South, white voters, even those who called themselves Democrats, voted overwhelmingly Republican—just as overwhelmingly, it turned out, as African Americans supported Democrats, with both giving 9 in 10 votes to their preferred party.

For black state legislators, 98 percent of them Democrats, that meant near-total isolation in the minority party across the South for the first time since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

The defeats meant a complete loss of control, or even influence, over the coming redistricting process. And as Columbia University journalism professor Thomas Edsall would point out, “Republicans in control of redistricting have two goals: the defeat of white Democrats and the creation of safe districts for Republicans. They have achieved both of these goals by increasing the number of districts likely to elect an African American. Black voters are gerrymandered out of districts represented by whites of both parties, making the Democratic incumbent weaker and the Republican incumbent stronger.”

In Washington, the loss of black electoral power was nearly as thorough. Black Democrats who had swept into power with Bill Clinton and were now elder statesmen in the House had held an unprecedented number of chairmanships, including the gavels of the powerful House Judiciary and Ways and Means committees, wielded for years by John Conyers of Michigan and Charlie Rangel of New York, plus the Homeland Security chairmanship held by Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi. Now all were gone, along with a dozen subcommittee chairmanships. For Rangel, Waters, and other Black Caucus members, ethics trials would replace committee hearings during the coming lame duck session.

Black voters in 2010 shed 3 percent from their share of the 2008 electorate, a performance that was stronger than the other Democratic constituencies, who ignored the midterms in droves. What sank the party’s prospects was the staggering decline among white voters, who if they didn’t stay home, coalesced to drive the Democrats from power in the House.

Obama described the election as a “shellacking,” but during the lame duck session in December, Democrats made the most of their remaining time in power: passing a full repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; extending unemployment benefits to beleaguered Americans; belatedly compensating first responders who toiled at the base of the destroyed World Trade Center in 2001; and ratifying a new nuclear START Treaty with Russia. The session led political scientist Larry Sabato to declare, via Twitter: “It’s official. Like it or not, this lame-duck session is the most productive of the 15 held since WWII.”

More triumphs for the administration would come in the new year, when on May 2, President Obama announced that a U.S. Navy SEAL team had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Celebrations erupted outside the White House at the news.

But the president’s war with parts of his base would linger, as Cornel West told Tavis Smiley on Smiley’s Public Radio International program within days of the bin Laden announcement: “You and I take seriously the legacy of Martin Luther King. . . . It means then that we must be dissenting voices in the middle of a moment of such self-celebration and self-congratulation, to say quite explicitly that justice does not come out the barrel of a gun.”

Smiley and West were mounting a growing crusade against the president, accusing him of paying insufficient attention to the poor, and to African Americans. Fourteen days after the bin Laden announcement, West called the president a “black mascot of Wall Street” and a man who has “a certain fear of free black men.”

West was roundly condemned for the comments, including by longtime friends, who privately wondered if the eccentric professor had lost his mind. West claimed, in his own defense and echoing Smiley’s own complaints, that he had been shut out by the White House; he said his calls went unreturned and invitations were not forthcoming. According to friends and a former White House staffer, West was even nursing a grudge over Obama’s inauguration: A bellman at his Washington hotel had received tickets to stand on the platform and West’s tickets were “merely” for the front row. (His repeated complaints eventually annoyed the president enough that Obama confronted West, as the professor stood on a rope line at the 2010 National Urban League annual meeting. According to a former staffer, “Obama said, ‘I can’t believe you keep telling these lies. You know I personally sent you and your mother inaugural tickets.’ Then the president and a couple of people with him walked to the back, and Obama spat out, ‘Did you hear him? This is why I don’t deal with these people.’ ”)

It was a bizarre and increasingly personal descent into demagogic warfare that led some of West’s fellow black public intellectuals, including MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, who like West was a former Princeton professor, to deride West in her column in The Nation as “President Obama’s silenced, disregarded, disrespected moral conscience,” and to label his lamentations a “self-aggrandizing, victimology sermon deceptively wrapped in the discourse of prophetic witness.”

The irony of West’s critique is that it echoed a small but growing body of black thought that saw the president as not sufficiently forward-leaning on matters of race and woefully inattentive to African Americans who remained locked in a cycle of unemployment and economic want. Still, the president had his defenders, who were determined to stand between him and his fiercest critics on the left and the right.

“Obama is not the president of Black America,” Marc Morial of the Urban League said. “He’s not a civil rights leader. That job is taken, by the leaders of groups like the NAACP, the Urban League, and the National Action Network.” It was a view that Sharpton repeated often, including in sharp ongoing clashes, on camera and off, with West.

The rumblings of discontent came as the president prepared to hold his second formal meeting with the Black Caucus, on May 13, and as caucus members prepared to launch a multistate summer tour to dramatize the African American joblessness crisis. At the White House meeting, the members again pressed for economic policies targeted toward black communities, and the president continued to resist, insisting that his overall policies on education and health care would produce the most meaningful solutions for black economic progress.

Obama had his friends in the caucus, and he had his detractors. His staff worked closely with some members, and not with others. The caucus pushed hard on some issues, like revising administration education policies to avoid harming historically black colleges, and gave the White House a wide berth on others.

To White House aides, the narrative of African American critiques of the president became overly reductive and simplistic when translated by the D.C. media. “It’s either, we love him or we hate him,” a former staffer said, adding, “with any leader, particularly the first black president, it’s going to be complicated. Yes we love him and by and large most people see areas where they want him to shift and do things differently. He has tremendous respect for” the caucus members, “but he’s not going to agree with them every time and he has other stuff on his plate.”

In the end, the president’s conflict with members of the African American community was less daunting than what was taking place outside of Washington, where the Right was successfully building a racial narrative designed to drive a wedge between the president and white Democrats. Even members of the Black Caucus who were critical of the president’s policies said that dynamic informed the way they talked about the president and his administration.

One member of the caucus commented that though the members were unhappy about some things not being done, “[w]e’re not going to aid and abet the haters, because the moment we jumped in it would be used by the extreme right to further dismantle the legitimacy of this president.”

Indeed, when Obama addressed the caucus’s annual gala in September 2011 and enjoined black voters, “Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,” and “shake it off. Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We have work to do!” most of those assembled cheered, even as Emanuel Cleaver, then the caucus president, told McClatchy Newspapers that had Bill Clinton similarly failed to address black unemployment as part of his economic recovery plan, “[w]e probably would be marching on the White House.”

That reticence rankled some Obama critics among black intellectuals. Columbia University professor and author Frederick C. Harris said that even though African Americans were certain to overwhelmingly support the president’s reelection in 2012, “for those who had seen in President Obama’s election the culmination of four centuries of black hopes and aspirations and the realization of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a ‘beloved community,’ the last four years must be reckoned a disappointment.” Harris, in his book The Price of the Ticket, concluded that the Obama presidency had “already marked the decline, rather than the pinnacle, of a political vision centered on challenging racial inequality.” Harris added, “The tragedy is that black elites—from intellectuals and civil rights leaders to politicians and clergy members—have acquiesced to this decline, seeing it as the necessary price for the pride and satisfaction of having a black family in the White House.”

Harris and others noted that Obama rarely talked directly about race, and that when he did within the black community, it was often in the guise of a racial scold. At the Congressional Black Caucus gala, Obama rallied black voters to the cause, not with promises of direct aid to black communities, but with an appeal toward the collective responsibility to redeem the history of black struggle for the right to vote. The only concrete promise on the table was that his broad and untargeted economic agenda would lift black Americans, too.

But many African Americans and some white Obama supporters sensed that if there were those on the right who either couldn’t or wouldn’t fully accept Barack Obama as president, and who sought to mark his time in office with the asterisk of failure; some on the left would remain stubbornly unsatisfied no matter what the president accomplished. “I don’t recall you folks asking Clinton for his black agenda,” Rev. Sharpton, who began hosting a news/commentary program on MSNBC in January 2011, said when confronted by Obama critics like Smiley and West.

Those who remained in Obama’s corner saw him as a man marching into serial battles with the thinnest rear guard, and they tried to be his guardians, on social media, in fierce online commentary, and soon, at the ballot box.

ANY DESIRE OBAMA HAD TO STEER CLEAR OF THE ROCKY SHOALS of race and to hold his party’s interracial coalition together ahead of his 2012 reelection came crashing to the shore on February 26, 2012.

The NBA All-Star Game had returned to Orlando, Florida, for the first time in twenty years, and in Sanford, a small city just twenty-seven miles away from where the big game would be held, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin took a fateful trip to a convenience store in the rain, leaving the gated community where his father’s fiancée lived, to get her ten-year-old son some candy and a drink for himself before the game. He wouldn’t return.

Instead, Martin, who had been sent to stay with his father for a few weeks after getting into trouble at school in Miami, was shot dead by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer who spotted the teen walking in the drizzling rain, talking on his cell phone. Zimmerman, when questioned by the responding officers, claimed that the teen had attacked him out of nowhere, as he left his truck in the dark and rain to try to spot the young stranger while he called the police nonemergency line. The shooting remained a minor local news story for thirteen days, causing little notice outside of Sanford, whose only previous brush with national renown was as the city that once refused to let Jackie Robinson practice on its segregated baseball fields.

By March, Martin’s family had hired attorneys to sue the Sanford Police Department and demand the release of 911 calls from the night of the shooting. They held press conferences, demanding Zimmerman’s arrest. As days turned into weeks, with Zimmerman still free and a police department that appeared to be more sympathetic to the shooter than to the victim investigating the case, Martin’s anguished parents traveled to Sanford. They called Rev. Sharpton for help and also contacted Benjamin Crump, a civil rights attorney from Tallahassee who was known for taking cases involving the violent deaths of black men and boys. A storm was gathering over Sanford; age-old racial tensions gripped the town where a railroad line separated the main city limits from Goldsboro, the impoverished historically black neighborhood it once annexed.

The national rallies began on March 22 as Sharpton organized a march that attracted thirty thousand people to Fort Mellon Park, near Sanford City Hall. The growing controversy over Zimmerman’s continued freedom forced the resignation of the police chief that morning and put the anguish of Martin’s parents on national display.

Trayvon Martin’s boyish face, forever frozen in time in iconic black-and-white, staring out from a gray hoodie like the one he was wearing when he died on the wet grass, alone, was gaining national attention as young black men took to the airwaves and to online forums, declaring that their lives have value.

On the day of the Sanford march, Congressman Bobby Rush was escorted off the House floor after walking to the podium to speak and removing his suit jacket to reveal a gray hoodie underneath. The aging congressman, who remained the pastor of a Chicago church, pulled the hood over his head, launching into a protest sermon that began with the words “Racial profiling has to stop, Mr. Speaker. Just because someone wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum.” He proceeded to recite a biblical verse, Micah 6:8:

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.

And what does the Lord require of you?

To act justly and to love mercy,

And to walk humbly with your God.

Rush ended with a blessing on Trayvon Martin’s soul, as the acting chair, Republican Gregg Harper of Mississippi, pounded the gavel and ordered, “The gentleman will suspend!”

In the early weeks, the national outrage over Martin’s death was both universal and bipartisan, with both front-runners in the Republican presidential primary, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, calling the shooting “tragic,” and the lack of an immediate prosecution “chilling.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Zimmerman was “clearly overreaching” in his role as a neighborhood watch volunteer, while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, and even Florida tea party congressman Allen West made statements calling for an investigations into Martin’s killing.

Inside the White House, Obama was following the story along with the country. Sharpton’s involvement gave the president and Valerie Jarrett a direct line to what was happening in Sanford, where the local prosecutor recused himself, leading the Florida governor, Rick Scott, to appoint a special prosecutor. The Justice Department dispatched investigators to Sanford to search for any evidence of a hate crime. And the president’s personal circle was percolating with the same questions and concerns as the country at large.

And yet, for the White House, the politics were deeply uncertain.

Obama’s previous foray into public commentary on matters of race had met with singular scorn, and immediate backlash. With a reelection campaign ahead, the White House could ill afford to wade into an issue so heavily freighted with questions of gun rights and violence and racial identity. Zimmerman was white and Hispanic. Pro-gun activists were championing his cause. Prosecutors were using Florida’s version of the controversial, National Rifle Association–endorsed “Stand Your Ground” law—which protects an individual’s right to defend his life with deadly force if he feels threatened—in not charging Zimmerman.

And yet, with the national outcry over the case growing, touching off a country-wide conversation about the status of black men and boys in a society that often fears them, the nation’s African American president seemed conspicuous in his silence. Friends said that as a father, Obama was deeply disturbed by Martin’s death. Despite the objections of his senior communications staff, he resolved to speak out.

And so just after 10 A.M. on the day after the Sanford march, with Hillary Clinton and Tim Geithner standing on either side of the podium in the White House Rose Garden for the announcement of the nominee to head the World Bank, President Obama took a single, expected question.

“Mr. President, may I ask you about this current case in Florida, very controversial, allegations of lingering racism within our society—the so-called . . . Stand Your Ground law and the justice in that? Can you comment on the Trayvon Martin case, sir?”

Obama began by noting that as head of the executive branch, and with Eric Holder’s Justice Department in an open investigation, his remarks required care. He called Martin’s death an obvious tragedy and said that when he thought “about this boy, I think about my own kids.”

Obama said every parent should understand why the case had to be thoroughly investigated in order to prevent future tragedies and called on the nation to “do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen,” including examining “the laws and the context for what happened, as well as the specifics of the incident.” It wasn’t a call to review the nation’s gun laws or for activists to take to the streets.

And then Obama directed a message to Trayvon Martin’s parents. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” he said. “And I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”

It all seemed innocuous enough. The president hadn’t mentioned race as a root cause or even a factor in the shooting. He hadn’t criticized the legal process in Sanford, or its police force. Given that he is a black man, it seemed self-evident that if Barack Obama had a son, he, too, would be black, like Trayvon was.

Conservative media had largely sat out the national conversation on the shooting that was enthralling liberal media outlets and thought leaders. But Obama’s Rose Garden statement gave them a fresh opportunity to draw blood, and by the time he was appearing on Sean Hannity’s 3 P.M. radio show, Newt Gingrich had changed his mind, making a sharp U-turn from his remarks as recently as earlier that day. Now he rushed head-first into the breach, calling Obama’s comments “disgraceful,” accusing the president of dividing the country by race, and asking provocatively, “Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be okay because it didn’t look like him?”

It wasn’t long before the national shock over Trayvon Martin’s killing turned into a polarized showdown, between black supporters of Martin’s family and a growing number of white Americans who dismissed the marches, news conferences, and demands for justice as merely the latest in a history of racial taunts by Al Sharpton and other black leaders, designed to hold white Americans guilty and black Americans inviolable, forever. In that vein, the “national dialogue on race” that activists were calling for was most unwanted.

Soon, Trayvon Martin was being demonized in some right-wing quarters as an archetypal “thug”—particularly once attorneys for Zimmerman pushed to make public his text messages, which were filled with a teenager’s bravado. Conservative blogs seized on any kernel of information injurious to the dead teenager and his family, and Sean Hannity taped a sympathetic interview with George Zimmerman, which prosecutors, confounding legal watchers, would play back in lieu of his testimony during a belated trial.

And just as happened in the Henry Louis Gates incident, polls soon showed black and white Americans, and Republicans and Democrats, decamping to opposite ideological silos as the case hurtled toward a Sanford courtroom and the country headed for another polarized presidential election. The ongoing process of “racializing” Barack Obama had received another gear.