The successes of the modern Black Freedom Movement were largely accomplished by the existence of a strong black working class. In 1970, for example, almost 40 percent of all African Americans in the paid labor force were employed in blue-collar jobs, many in heavy industries such as steel, automobile production, food and tobacco manufacturing, and electrical and non-electrical machinery. Most of these jobs were unionized, which provided pensions and healthcare for workers and their families. The bulk of the well-paid workers were located in the industrial heartland of the U.S. Midwest and Northeast. Blacks had also significantly narrowed the historic wage gap they experienced with whites, as their percentage of medium incomes compared to white incomes rose from about 50 percent in 1958 to 63 percent in 1973. For African Americans with college degrees, under age thirty-five, the historic income gap between blacks and whites virtually disappeared. The number of African Americans attending colleges and professional schools soared, from about 400,000 in 1970 to 1.1 million only 10 years later. Policies such as affirmative action, combined with the enforcement of equal opportunity laws established by the federal government, directly contributed to the creation of the modern black middle class.
The economic foundations for black advancement began to change in the 1970s, due to the destructive processes of what economists termed “deindustrialization.” Between 1973 and 1980, over 4 million jobs disappeared in the United States, as hundreds of American corporations moved their operations outside the country. New York City alone lost 40,000 to 50,000 jobs in the apparel and textile industries. Corporations increasingly divested their profits from U.S.-based subsidiaries and reinvested in operations abroad. In the 1970s, over 30 million total jobs were eliminated through factory closings, relocations, and then phased elimination of operations. The shrinking of U.S.-based industries had a deep impact on labor unions, as the percentage of union members within the American labor force decreased by half in only two decades. Hardest hit were African-American blue-collar workers, because in 1983, over 27 percent of all blacks in the U.S. labor force were union members, a significantly higher percentage than for white workers.
Concurrent with the restructuring of the capitalist economy was a worldwide trend to dismantle the welfare state. Beginning with the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and the triumph of mass conservation in the United States under Ronald Reagan the following year, an antistalist philosophy began to exert hegemony affecting the ways in which governments functioned all over the world. With the shift to the right, the government significantly reduced or eliminated support for many of the liberal welfare programs that had been instituted during the previous half-century: public housing, public education, job training, food stamps and child nutrition, and support for the indigent and disabled. As President Reagan succinctly put the matter, government was “not the solution, government was the problem.” The difficulty confronting black Americans here was twofold. Historically, for all of its limitations, as a result of mass pressure the federal government has been the chief public guarantor of civil rights and has at times even forced the abolition of the most extreme forms of racial domination; for example, the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlawing slavery and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act ending Jim Crow segregation. Reducing federal power and bringing about a return to “states rights” were, at face value, potentially damaging to blacks’ interests. Secondly, African Americans in the 1980s were heavily over-represented as employees of the public sector. Reducing the size of the state inevitably would mean that African Americans would experience significantly higher levels of unemployment. Black women were especially vulnerable to the conservative assault on the public sector. Eighty-five percent of all professional African-American women by the early 1990s, for example, worked in three major industries dominated by government and nonprofit employment: social services, health care, and education.
Another factor that had an impact on black politics was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement during 1989–1991. Since the end of World War II, international politics had been defined by the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. The dissolution of the Soviet model instantly meant that the political space for a Third World—those non-Western states strategically positioned between capitalism and communism—also ceased to exist. In the 1980s the United States invaded Grenada and installed its own puppet regime, and the leftist Sandinistas lost power in Nicaragua. By the early 1990s, Asian, African, and Caribbean states with long histories of socialist politics were pressured to adopt “neoliberal,” market-oriented policies and austerity measures. Social-democratic parties worldwide shifted significantly to the right. Although no widespread movement for communism or socialism existed in the United States, these global political developments were profoundly felt within African-American politics. With few models to point to, some argued that socialism, however defined, no longer represented a viable alternative to capitalism. If black people had any future, it was argued, it was to be found in the capitalist marketplace. The traditional discourse of the black left—“socialism,” “anti-imperialism,” “cooperative economics”—began to lose ground to the gospel of wealth, entrepreneurship, and black capitalism. The conservative ideology of Booker T. Washington resurfaced in the age of cyberspace.
The erosion of the public sector and the loss of millions of urban jobs contributed to a significant increase in class stratification within the national black community. The African-American community was overwhelmingly working class in composition in the 1970s. By the late 1990s, the socioeconomic profile of black America had changed considerably. About 51 percent of all black employees sixteen years old and over were classified as white-collar workers. Approximately 60 percent of these were white-collar sales and clerical personnel; many in this group were nonunion workers with limited or nonexistent benefits and wages. However, another 20 percent of the black labor force, nearly 3 million workers, was classified as professional and technical workers and administrators. The percentage of blue-collar workers had declined to 28 percent of the black labor force. Black farm laborers, farmers, and agricultural managers, who in 1940 had represented one-third of the entire black workforce, had virtually disappeared, with only about 80,000 jobs remaining. During this period, the black business sector had mushroomed.
By 1992 the number of black-owned businesses had grown to 621,000. The number of black-owned real estate, insurance, and financial lending companies had quadrupled in only fifteen years, and this sector’s total gross receipts had increased sixfold. By the late 1990s, a small number of African-American executives had become chief executive officers and presidents of major corporations, such as Time Warner and American Express. An even smaller number of black celebrities—such as television personalities Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby, pop star Michael Jackson, and superstar athletes such as golfer Tiger Woods, and basketball stars Michael Jordan and Earvin “Magic” Johnson—were each worth hundreds of millions of dollars. For the first time in U.S. history, a “black bourgeoisie” had come to exist.
These economic changes had profound consequences for African Americans. Deprived of their tax revenues from industries and manufacturing companies, city governments reduced expenditures for public institutions of all kinds—schools, hospitals, parks, libraries, public universities, and public housing. With the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, the new conservative administration quickly moved to reduce federal government spending on urban development and social services. The Reagan administration terminated the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act program, a successful job training program that had been funded in 1982 at $3.1 billion; eliminated $2 billion from the federal food stamps program; reduced federal support for child nutrition programs by $1.7 billion over a two-year period; and closed down the Neighborhood Self Help and Planning Assistance programs, which provided technical and financial help to inner cities. In the first year of the Reagan administration, the real median income of all black families fell by 5.2 percent.
Also in the 1980s, a strong white backlash against civil rights expressed itself in opposition to school desegregation in the North and growing hostility to increased racial integration in higher education and professional occupations through affirmative action. Millions of white Americans became convinced that “too much” had been given to blacks in recent years. Middle-class African Americans also encountered more subtle, yet unmistakable, patterns of racial discrimination that severely restricted their upward mobility. Sociologist Lawrence Bobo has described this racial ceiling on group advancement as “laissez faire racism.” The examples of “laissez faire racism,” which have been documented by numerous studies, are almost endless: white car dealerships that charge blacks hundreds of dollars more for automobiles than they do whites; hospitals that routinely provide substandard treatment for minorities; insurance companies that systematically charge black consumers higher rates than whites to insure homes of identical market value; grocery store chains that transport older produce from white suburban shopping-mall markets to groceries in predominantly black communities; the denial of employment opportunities to blacks at senior levels of management and administration in large companies and institutions.
Many middle-class blacks, confronted with the steady deterioration of public services, schools, and the elimination of jobs in central cities, relocated to the suburbs. However, because white real estate firms, banks, and financial lending institutions continued informal policies of residential discrimination, many upper- to middle-income blacks found themselves moving from segregated ghettoes to racially segregated suburbs or planned communities. Black working-class families without the material resources or credit to purchase homes outside economically depressed areas found themselves living in what, at times, had become almost urban wastelands.
In huge districts of America’s major cities, neighborhoods had become desperately poor—Chicago’s South Side, East New York in Brooklyn, the South Bronx, South Central Los Angeles, East Oakland, and nearly all of Detroit. Families attempting to upgrade their residences or start businesses in these neighborhoods were forced to rely on “predatory lenders,” finance companies charging outrageously high interest rates on borrowed money. In such inner city communities, businesses of nearly every type, other than personal services such as restaurants, barber shops, beauty salons, and funeral homes largely disappeared. By the 1990s in many inner cities, between one-third to one-half of a neighborhood’s total adult population was no longer in the paid labor force. Millions survived in the informal economy, generating a subsistence income through activities as diverse as braiding hair, childcare, collecting and selling recyclable bottles and cans, catering food, auto repair, moving, producing and selling crafts, and so on. For many who had once held stable blue-color jobs, low-wage service jobs, such as in the fast-food industry, were among the few alternatives.
Such widespread poverty, such intense patterns of unemployment, hunger and homelessness, as well as the growth of global markets in drugs and arms, fostered the trafficking in illegal drugs. In the early 1980s, a new addictive product, “crack,” a rock-type of cocaine, was introduced into inner-city neighborhoods. Unlike powdered cocaine, the fashionable drug of choice of the wealthy, crack was very inexpensive, readily available, and highly addictive. Within a few years, several hundred thousand African Americans had become addicted to crack, and relatively few drug treatment centers were available. With the decline in employment and educational opportunities, some young people saw selling drugs as the only way to make a decent income, and violence, once relatively rare in black working-class communities, increased significantly. Although several inner-city communities became the marketplace for the lucrative international traffic in illegal substances, the overwhelming bulk of the profits were reaped by those outside these communities, such as international crime cartels and the banks that launder their money. Inner-city communities became the targets of police sweeps and searches. Though a minority of young men were actively involved in criminal activities connected with the drug traffic, virtually all black male youth were subject to being stigmatized as criminals by the police and media.
Federal and state governments responded by making the penalties for drug sale and possession more severe, by eliminating parole, and by constructing a vast network of new prisons. Legislatures passed new mandatory minimum sentencing laws, requiring convicted felons to serve lengthy prison terms before becoming eligible for release. Juveniles were increasingly treated as adults, and were subjected to many of the same penalties. Developments in New York State during these years were typical of what occurred throughout the nation. Between 1817 and 1981, the state had constructed thirty-three prisons; between 1981 and 1999, it built thirty-eight new correctional facilities. New York’s prison population grew in two decades from 13,500 to 74,000.
Throughout the country, the total population of prisoners reached 650,000 in 1983, 1 million in 1990, and 2 million by 2001. One-half of these prisoners were African Americans. By 2000, one-third of all black males in their twenties were under the control of the criminal justice system, either in prison or jail, on parole, probation, or awaiting trial. The major reason for this disproportion in incarceration was the stark racism that pervaded the criminal justice system. Though African Americans in 2002 constituted approximately 14 percent of all illegal drug users, they comprised approximately one-third of all drug arrests and over 50 percent of all drug convictions in federal and state courts. The socioeconomic and political consequences of mass incarceration for the black community have been profound. Several million black households have been destroyed; tens of thousands of black children separated from their parents and raised in foster care. In seven states as of 2005, convicted felons lost the right to vote for life, and as a result, by 2000 over 1.4 million African Americans had been permanently disenfranchised. For several million blacks with criminal records, better paying jobs were no longer available even years after their release and rehabilitation. Inside prisons, however, incarcerated African Americans organized a wide variety of resistance activities (document 15).
Despite these unprecedented challenges, African Americans in the 1980s collectively initiated a series of highly successful resistance movements. In electoral politics at the local level, the most significant of these was represented by Harold Washington. For nearly fifty years the Cook County Democratic Party machine had controlled municipal government in Chicago by manipulating votes and using corrupt patronage and graft. Under Chicago political boss Mayor Richard Daley the black community was severely disadvantaged; schools were underfunded and public services were unequally distributed. In 1982 a coalition of largely black community organizations convinced Congressman Washington to challenge the Democratic machine. Washington forged an unprecedented coalition of blacks, Latinos, labor, progressive whites, and other constituencies, sometimes referred to as a “rainbow coalition,” and, in a three-way race, Washington defeated incumbent mayor Jane Byrne, and Richard M. Daley, the son of the former mayor, to win the Democratic Party’s nomination. In the general election on April 12, 1983, Washington defeated Republican challenger Bernard Upton to become the first African-American mayor of Chicago (see document 3). As mayor, Washington tried to eliminate corruption, made city government more transparent, forged coalitions with neighborhood groups, expanded city services in minority neighborhoods, and restored the city’s financial health through a property tax increase. Reelected in 1987, Washington died of a heart attack on November 25 of that same year.
The advances achieved by politicians like Washington pressured local and national politics to give greater priority to African-American issues, and set the stage for the 1984 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson. Becoming involved in the civil rights movement first through CORE, Jackson had joined the SCLC and soon became a protégé of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After King’s assassination, Jackson launched Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), which created “corporate covenants” and other business-related partnerships that produced jobs and expanded black entrepreneurship.
In 1983, Jackson announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Many black elected officials and prominent civil rights leaders, including Coretta Scott King and Andrew Young, opposed Jackson’s candidacy. However, he successfully built an interracial coalition similar to Harold Washington’s, which included blacks, Latinos, lesbians and gays, environmentalists, peace activists, progressives from organized labor, and many others. In 1984, Jackson lost the three-way Democratic primary to Walter F. Mondale, but his “Rainbow Coalition” won him 3.5 million popular votes, making him the first serious African-American challenger for the presidency.
The success of Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign created widespread support for his second effort to capture the Democratic Party’s nomination four years later. Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition called for federal initiatives to address unemployment, health, education, housing, and urban problems. The campaign mobilized an unprecedented interracial coalition and prompted hundreds of thousands of new black voters to register. Jackson received over 7 million popular votes—from 4 million African Americans and an additional 3 million whites, Asians, and Latinos, and won a series of primary contests. Jackson narrowly lost the nomination, however, to Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, who was subsequently defeated in the general election by Republican candidate George H. W. Bush (document 7).
Another issue central to black activism in the 1980s and early 1990s was South Africa. The Reagan administration initiated a policy of “constructive engagement” with the apartheid regime of South Africa, encouraging American investment in the country, thus providing economic support for the white-minority state. This prompted demonstrations against apartheid and U.S. investment in South Africa. Following Reagan’s reelection in 1984, several groups of black progressive—nationalists, integrationists, and transformationalists—mapped out strategies to attack the administration’s links with apartheid South Africa. The best known of these groups was led by Randall Robinson, executive director of TransAfrica; Mary Frances Berry, a civil rights commissioner; and District of Columbia congressman Walter Fauntroy. The coalition leaders staged a small, symbolic demonstration in front of the South African embassy in late November 1984, and they were “pleasantly surprised” when officials panicked and called the police. Their arrests sparked hundreds of nonviolent demonstrations across the United States. Within two weeks, protests involving hundreds of thousands of people were staged at South African consulates in more than one dozen cities, including Salt Lake City, Boston, Chicago, and Houston (see document 6).
On college campuses, hundreds of thousands of students demonstrated against universities and corporations that did business inside South Africa. Divestment legislation amounting to $400 million in public funds was secured in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, Maryland, Philadelphia, and a dozen other smaller cities in 1985. Jesse Jackson challenged the Democratic leadership to demand immediate freedom for Nelson Mandela, the political spokesperson for the African National Congress (ANC) and future South African president, who had been imprisoned on Robben’s Island for over two decades. Other black congressmen pressured for the release of other political prisoners as well.
Successful models of black political resistance also emerged from African-American popular culture. In the 1970s a new urban-based cultural movement popularly termed hip-hop emerged. The core elements of hip-hop culture include graffiti, break dancing, emceeing, deejaying, and rap music, which is based on the spoken word and its interplay with the musical beat. To many, rap’s jarring style and frequent use of profanity was difficult to understand. However, for many young blacks and Latinos born after the civil rights and Black Power period, hip-hop embodied their own feelings and expressions about the nature of contemporary society. Created in the context of poverty, high unemployment, and the drug epidemic in inner cities, rap was a means through which to give voice to a generation’s critique of their own marginalization from mainstream society. Militant, edgy, and radical in their lyrics, hip-hop artists used their records as a platform to address the inequities of the establishment. Such artists as Afrika Bambataa and the Zulu Nation, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, who were later termed “old school rap” artists, were unscrupulously exploited by managers and music business executives. In 1982, twenty-two-year-old rapper Chuck D. (Clareton Ridenhower) formed the group Public Enemy, which signed a contract with Def Jam Records. Public Enemy’s second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, was a bold and provocative statement of revolutionary politics.
In the 1990s, progressive artists such as Public Enemy, KRS One, a Tribe Called Quest, and Mos Def spoke about AIDS/HIV awareness, called for an end to black-on-black violence, encouraged voter registration, and campaigned against budget cuts in public schools. Black female rap artists such as Sister Souljah, Salt-n-Pepa, and Queen Latifah provided powerful images of self-confidence and activism for millions of young African-American women. Successful hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons, cofounder of Def Jam records, initiated campaigns to promote voting among black youth and to oppose the privatization of public schools and a public educational effort to debate the issue of “black reparations,” the question of whether African Americans should finally be compensated for centuries of enslavement and Jim Crow segregation (document 18).
By the mid-1990s, in response to the escalating prison industrial complex and epidemic of police brutality, many African Americans concluded that a new kind of social protest was necessary, to promote black pride, personal responsibility, and collective empowerment. These efforts crystallized in 1994–1995 around Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s call for a “Million Man March.” On October 16, 1995, approximately one million participants poured into the Washington Mall from all over the United States. It was without question the largest single gathering of black people in U.S. history. Studies indicated that the participants were mostly of the middle class, older, and had a proportionally higher level of education than black men in general. The march was, for many, an emotional event that symbolized the coming together of black men across generations, rededicated to a common social and political project of atonement, personal responsibility, and collective empowerment. Speakers who ranged from religious leaders to community activists, addressed issues of education, racism, welfare, and other community issues. This perhaps explains the popular slogan in support of the mobilization: “Farrakhan may have called the March, but the March belongs to us (document 13).”
Black feminists condemned the patriarchy and homophobia prevalent in much of the mobilization’s literature. Others praised the objective of the March but criticized Farrakhan for anti-Semitism and racism. Still others objected to the emphasis on “atonement” at a time when the Republican-controlled Congress was eliminating programs designed to help the black community. Nevertheless, it had an important impact on raising awareness about the continued struggle against structural inequalities. Within the next year, over 1.5 million additional black men had registered to vote.
As the conservative nationalists briefly took center stage, the revolutionary nationalists had become largely marginalized. With the government-sponsored destruction of the Black Panthers and the demise of radical groups such as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the revolutionary nationalists sought to reconstitute themselves as a viable political force. In 1980, two progressive nationalist groups emerged: in Brooklyn, the National Black United Front (NBLU), led by the Reverend Herbert Daughtry, and in Philadelphia, the National Black Independent Political Party (NBIPP), which included activists Ronald Daniels and Benjamin Chavis. After attracting several thousand supporters but only achieving modest success, NBIPP disappeared in the mid-1980s, and NBUF largely declined as a political force several years later. The two most prominent revolutionary nationalists in this period were political prisoners who had become internationally known. Assata Shakur, a former activist in the Black Panther Party, escaped from prison and in the early 1980s found political asylum in Cuba. Her moving portrait of the plight of African-American women prisoners presented here gives some insights into her radical political philosophy (document 2).
America’s most celebrated and controversial prisoner on death row in the 1990s was unquestionably Mumia Abu-Jamal. Also a former member of the Black Panther Party, Jamal was convicted of the murder of a Philadelphia police officer. Despite substantial evidence of witness tampering and illegal activities by prosecutors and police, Jamal was denied a new trial. Yet from the isolation of his prison cell on death row, Jamal’s articulate voice and powerful prose found an international audience (document 14).
Some of the most powerful and original critiques of racialized inequality during these years were produced by African-American feminists. The Combahee River Collective statement, originally written in the spring of 1977, reflected the core ideas behind this new feminist movement. The statement envisioned a politics of black liberation that simultaneously challenged sexism, homophobia, racism, and class exploitation at every level of society (document 1). The Combahee River Collective Statement was soon followed by a series of black feminist theoretical works and collections of social essays that powerfully reshaped the entire black left. Some of the major works included Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (see document 5), Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought, Barbara Smith’s wonderfully titled anthology, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, and Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class. One of the most popular black feminist intellectuals was Audre Lorde. A lesbian, feminist, and revolutionary, Lorde wrote poetry and social essays with such grace and clarity that she motivated and appealed to very diverse audiences (document 4). The development of black feminist thought in universities was paralleled by the growth of black women’s leadership in thousands of community-based, grassroots-oriented organizations at the neighborhood level throughout the United States.
The transformationist, black-radical tradition had not disappeared, despite the political defeats and losses in previous years. It has been evident in the militant role played by African-American workers in bringing about significant changes in the AFL-CIO, as well as in the successful struggle for a free South Africa. In the late 1990s, it attempted to reconstitute itself as a vital political force once again. In the aftermath of the Million Man March, a small group of African-American political activists, intellectuals, and leaders from labor, lesbian-gay, feminist, revolutionary nationalist, and Marxist organizations initiated a call for a Black Radical Congress (BRC), a national gathering of black progressive forces. At the Congress, which was held in Chicago on June 19–21, 1998, more than 2,000 activists who self-identified with radical anticapitalist politics came together. A nationwide network of BRC local organizing committees was formed, involving members in various local and national campaigns against police brutality, for full employment, and in efforts to halt the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal. The BRC’s “Call to the Congress,” “Principles of Unity,” and “Freedom Agenda” presented the basic political beliefs that could unify a broadly diverse group of activists (document 16).
As the twenty-first century dawned, American politics took a sharp turn to the right with two events: the narrow electoral victory of Republican George W. Bush as president in 2000 (see document 17), and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon, on September 11, 2001 (see document 20). The attacks on 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to pass laws severely restricting civil liberties and constitutional rights. Many Americans who were of Middle Eastern descent, or were identified as Muslims, were subjected to harassment, surveillance, and even arrest. As the United States launched its military invasion of Iraq in 2003, African-American opposition quickly became overwhelming (document 20). In terms of racial relations, the campaign in Iraq provoked waves of American xenophobia and intolerance. The “war on terror” had created in the United States a new “Racialized Other”—who was Muslim or Middle Eastern in background.
As many African Americans fought to end U.S. military involvement in Iraq and to remove the Republican-controlled Congress, there continued to be reminders that the United States remained a structurally racist society. The most vivid example of this was provided by the Hurricane Katrina crisis of August–September 2005. The areas most devastated by Hurricane Katrina were Louisiana, Mississippi, and southwestern Alabama. By any standard, in terms of tens of billions of dollars in property damage and over one thousand lives lost, it was the largest natural disaster in U.S. history. The most heavily damaged major urban center that the storm affected was New Orleans, a city with an unrivaled historical tradition of black music and culture.
After the disaster struck New Orleans, President George W. Bush defensively argued that no one could have possibly anticipated the flooding experienced throughout much of the city, despite the fact that a number of scientists and investigative reporters had, for years, predicted that such a catastrophe was inevitable. But what made the New Orleans tragedy an “unnatural disaster” was the federal government’s gross incompetence and indifference in taking the necessary measures to preserve the lives and property of hundreds of thousands of its citizens.
Even before Hurricane Katrina struck, it was obvious that the overwhelming majority of New Orleans residents who would be trapped inside the city to face the deluge would be poor and working-class African Americans, who comprised nearly 70 percent of the city’s population. As the levees collapsed and the city’s predominantly black Ninth Ward flooded, thousands of evacuees were herded into the Superdome and Convention Center, where they were forced to endure days without toilets and running water, food, electricity, and medical help. Hundreds of black evacuees seeking escape on a bridge across the Mississippi River were confronted and forcibly pushed back into the city. Much of the media coverage cruelly manipulated racist stereotypes in its reports. The barrage of racialized images of a terrorized crime-engulfed city prompted hundreds of white ambulance drivers and emergency personnel to refuse to enter the New Orleans disaster zone. Television reports locally and nationally quickly proliferated false exposés about “babies in the Convention Center who got their throats cut” and “armed hordes” hijacking ambulances and trucks.
Nationally, most African-American leaders, public officials, and intellectuals were overwhelmed and outraged by the flood of racist stereotypes in the media, and their government’s appalling inaction in the rescuing of poor black people. African Americans were stunned and perplexed by white America’s general apathy and denial about the racial implications of the Katrina catastrophe. But the racial stigmatization of New Orleans’s outcasts forced many African Americans to ponder whether their government and white institutions had become incapable of expressing true compassion for the suffering of their people (document 23).
In 2007–2008, the presidential campaign of Democratic Illinois senator Barack Obama represented one of the innovative challenges by people of African descent to the structure of white privilege and power in America. Unlike Jackson’s protest-oriented presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988, the Obama campaign was from the beginning both pragmatic and ideologically liberal-progressive. Along with a new generation of African-American leaders—such as Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick and Newark, New Jersey, mayor Corey Booker—Obama espoused a race-neutral politics, minimizing discussions about blacks’ grievances while emphasizing the common ground shared by Americans regardless of race, ethnicity, class, or gender. Despite Obama’s relatively moderate politics, many conservative pundits sought to exploit Islamophobia and racial bigotry from the beginning of his campaign. Because Obama’s father had been a Kenyan of Muslim descent, critics falsely charged that Obama, a Christian, was secretly a Muslim, and even a possible terrorist. Another controversy that nearly destroyed Obama’s campaign was the provocative statements of the candidate’s former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Obama’s response to the Wright controversy was a brilliant address, “A More Perfect Union,” which critics praised as the most powerful and thoughtful statement about the meaning of race in American life since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s, “I Have A Dream” speech, delivered at the March on Washington, D.C. (document 25).
Defeating his major opponent, New York senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama captured the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in August 2008. Many still doubted the ability of an African American to be elected to the U.S. presidency, citing previous gubernatorial and mayoral elections in which African-American candidates received far fewer votes from whites than voter surveys had predicted. However, on November 4, 2008, the U.S. electorate made history by electing the first African American, Barack Obama, as the nation’s chief executive. Winning with a margin of nearly 53 percent—the largest vote of any Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964—Obama’s triumph was produced by a combination of old-fashioned coalition building and new age technology. He captured between 95 and 97 percent of all African-American voters, as well as a substantial share of the vote from other racialized minorities, including 67 percent of Latinos and 62 percent of Asian Americans. Jewish voters overwhelmingly backed Obama with 78 percent of their votes. The charismatic candidate won 62 percent from young voters (ages 18–29) and 58 percent from women voters. Supported by the major trade unions, Obama also appealed as well to more educated affluent voters. He won a majority of voters earning over $250,000 annually and held an 18-point margin over his Republican opponent, senator John McCain, among voters with advanced academic and professional degrees. Obama’s electoral victory sparked hundreds, and probably thousands, of spontaneous celebrations and street parties across the country.
Less widely recognized was that a crucial dimension of Obama’s victory was his ability to appeal to moderate Republicans and independents. Roughly one-sixth of Americans who had voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and/or 2004 voted for Obama in 2008. Throughout his presidential campaign, Obama explicitly refused to attack the Republican Party, per se, focusing criticisms on either McCain, the Republican right wing, or Republican policies. Obama’s campaign recognized that in the wake of political disasters such as the unpopular Iraq War, and the federal mishandling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many voters longed for a politics that transcended partisan divisions. Obama’s race-neutrality and demeanor of cool competency reassured millions of white Americans, allowing them to vote for a “black candidate.”
Does the emergence of Barack Obama represent the possibility of a “post-racial America,” a society that transcends its historic racial divide of structural inequality? Despite this extraordinary accomplishment, it is imperative to distinguish between the elevation of individuals and the material realities of black daily life in twenty-first-century America. In addition to support from a mass movement, Obama’s victory was made possible, in part, by his brilliant oratory and his ability to reframe issues in ways that brought diverse constituencies together. This was clearly represented by Obama’s keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Party National Convention, as well as his later address, “A More Perfect Union” (document 25). Obama has assumed a historic role similar to that of Nelson Mandela of South Africa, an inspirational, charismatic leader of African descent who advances a politics of racial reconciliation, human rights, and color-blind cooperation. One major concern is whether the extraordinary hopes and expectations of Obama’s millions of admirers can be addressed by an administration challenged by a severe economic recession and wars abroad.
It is sometimes stated that the only constant in politics is change. The African-American people, now numbering over 42 million, represent a virtual nation within a nation, possessing its own rich traditions of culture, social organization, rituals and beliefs, and modes of political struggle. The history of black American social and political thought is a history of vast change and transformation through slavery, segregation, and ghettoization. Yet it is also a story of long memory, of political cultures of continuity and institutional developments transcending generations. The ideologies of integration, black nationalism, and radical transformation have in different ways and over time spoken to a common project—the achievement of full and unconditional freedom for black people. Throughout each phase of struggle, through long storms of oppression, black folk have found courage in the enduring belief that they would never be turned around, that the struggle for freedom would continue, and that it could one day be won.