The First Civil Rights Movement ended and the Second Civil Rights Movement began in a seventeen-minute blowup at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.
No one saw it coming. The man scheduled to speak during those seventeen minutes, Barack Obama, was little known to anyone outside the state of Illinois. He was a total unknown to national civil rights leaders. A preview of convention speakers put a spotlight on the newcomer. It was headlined: “Who the Heck Is This Guy?”1
The blunt answer: he was a young Black man selected to help John Kerry, the party’s nominee, win over Black voters.
The Kerry camp’s first selection for the keynote address had been Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan. A former beauty queen and a Harvard Law graduate, she had upset a Republican favorite to become her state’s first female governor. Kerry’s advisers saw her presence on the convention stage helping Kerry with Midwestern voters, especially women. But two weeks before the convention, polls showed Kerry, a stiff New Englander born into a family fortune, in dire need of help connecting with Black voters, a crucial part of the Democratic coalition. That led Kerry’s staff to try something different. They called on Obama.
The day Obama’s selection was announced, the Kerry campaign also unveiled a record-setting, multimillion-dollar advertising buy in Black media for the week of the convention. It also issued a press release celebrating that nearly 40 percent of the delegates would be minorities, a first for any major party convention in American history.2
Racial considerations stood out about the choice of Obama, who had little to no recognition nationally. In fact, four years earlier Obama had lost a race for Congress from a mostly Black district. He had never run a statewide race in Illinois. His future campaign manager later defined him as “a candidate with no chance, no money, and the funny name.”3
“Just think,” said Senator John Edwards, the vice presidential candidate on the Kerry ticket, “the man is the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention, and he hasn’t even been elected [to national office] yet.”4 Older Black politicians in Chicago dissed him by twisting his name from Obama to “Alabama.” But Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking Black official in Congress, said that the point of Obama’s presence on the big stage was to send a message “to young, upwardly mobile African Americans that this party is inclusive, that this party is not afraid of new thoughts and is not afraid of young Blacks.”5
In the back rooms of the Kerry campaign, what went without saying was that Black voter turnout in the November general election would be key to a Kerry victory. And Kerry’s campaign had polling showing that Black voters were not particularly excited by Kerry. Black voter turnout had steadily declined over the past four decades, after the excitement following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Already depressed Black voter participation in presidential races hit new lows after the dispiriting riots following Dr. King’s assassination. The exception had been when Rev. Jesse Jackson had run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and more strongly and seriously in 1988. After Jackson’s second run, Black political energy on the national scene once again was at low tide. Between the 1992 and 2004 presidential races, no black Democrat won even one presidential primary.
In 1992 the Democrats won the presidency with a Southern, white governor, Bill Clinton of Arkansas. Clinton’s victory was tailored to appeal to the kitchen-table, budgeting concerns of white suburbanites. His campaign strategy was boiled down to a comment from James Carville, one of his strategists: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Clinton did business with Jackson but also sent signals that he was a suburban-friendly political moderate. He took conservative positions on welfare reform, criminal sentencing, and even culture. He staked a claim to moderate racial politics by denouncing a Black rapper, Sister Souljah, who had told an interviewer that violence by Blacks against whites could be “wise… if Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people.”6 Clinton’s response created a new entry in the political lexicon: a “Sister Souljah moment.” Speaking before a primarily Black audience at Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, he said that the entertainer’s comment was not only wrongheaded but could have come from the murderous Ku Klux Klan. The front-page coverage put space between Clinton and the Black left. It also put a stiff arm in Jackson’s chest.
Nevertheless, Clinton did not lose Jackson’s support and remained popular with African American voters, but Black turnout sagged in 2000 when Vice President Al Gore, another white Southerner, lost a close election to Governor George W. Bush of Texas. Like Clinton, Gore had focused his campaigns on pulling white middle-class voters away from Republicans. And like Clinton, Gore knew it was in his interest to keep Jackson happy. As a matter of hardball politics, however, Clinton and Gore kept their distance from Jackson’s platform, specifically his left-of-center push for more spending on social-safety-net programs. They spoke reverently about early civil rights triumphs but wanted nothing to do with Jackson and his fellow activists, who insisted on talking about the current state of race relations and about the racial gaps that remained since the 1960s—in unemployment, income, and high school graduation rates, while federal prisons held more and more Black people.
In the 2004 campaign, Kerry’s team understood the need to reach Black voters. But they faced a difficult racial calculus. They felt the need to move beyond Jackson’s increasingly limited appeal to whites as well as Blacks as an old-guard civil rights leader. Obama was definitely not in the Jackson mold. Whereas Jackson personified the Black experience of the mid-twentieth century—he had roots in the South, had attended a Black college, and worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—Obama was a biracial man from Hawaii, had gone to white schools, and earned an Ivy League law degree. He had no ties to the South or the history of slavery. He had no ties to King or any of the work of the Civil Rights Movement.
Barack Obama was born in 1961 to a white mother and a visiting African scholar from Kenya, whose union crossed deep racial lines in the United States. For most of American history even the hint of an interracial sexual relationship could trigger violence, lynching, murder. But Obama grew up physically and emotionally distant from that painful history. He was born in Hawaii, a state largely populated by a mix of whites, Asians, and Pacific Islanders, along with a tiny Black population. Then, after his parents’ divorce, his mother took him to live in Indonesia.
After attending elite, mostly white colleges, Obama made the choice in his twenties to identify with Black Americans and their historic struggle for equal rights. His future in graduate school or corporate America was on a steady path. But he risked it all by taking a low-paying job as a community organizer in Chicago. He lived in racially diverse neighborhoods like Kenwood and Hyde Park but worked in Roseland, a Black, low-income section of the city.
That’s when he came face-to-face with generations of Black American poverty, people living with high rates of crime. He was in and out of community groups and churches supporting families that had so many men in jail. He confronted the damage still inflicted on Black people by America’s ugly past. It was hard for him, as it would be for anyone, to escape the legacy of slavery, legal segregation, bad schools, and high poverty rates.
Obama later wrote that his political ambitions led him to Chicago, a center of Black life, music, civil rights, and politics. The city was racially segregated, but the large Black population created opportunity for Black businesses, and Black economic power helped Black people step into the voting booth. Chicago was at the forefront of electing Black politicians to City Hall and Congress. Seeking to follow this emerging path to Black political power, Obama returned to the city after attending Harvard Law School (and serving as the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review). He won election to the Illinois State Senate in 1996, representing Chicago’s racially diverse Thirteenth District, which covers the South Side of the city along the lakefront. He was elected to a four-year term in 1998 and reelected in 2002. In between, he lost his first campaign for federal office, in 2000, when he tried to unseat the incumbent congressman, Bobby Rush, in the Democratic primary. Rush, an older Black candidate and veteran of the Black Panther movement, defeated him handily.
Despite losing to an icon of the First Movement, in his speeches and writings, Obama said that he admired the Civil Rights Movement, envied its heroes, and saw himself in the brave young people, Black and white, who had faced down firebomb attacks, beatings, and murder to join the Freedom Rides and register voters during Freedom Summer. Their example had led him to his job as a community organizer.
All this was true, but Obama was never part of the civil rights establishment. When he graduated from Columbia, he wrote to several national civil rights groups looking for work, but none responded. Instead, it was white ministers at a local Chicago nonprofit who hired Obama. As one publication later delicately put it, they came out of far-left politics with past ties to communists and were viewed with suspicion by the local Black clergy. They needed a young Black man with no connection to their past to become their tie to the Black community.7
In practice, that meant that when Obama arrived in Chicago, his primary political sponsors were white progressives, people in line with union organizers and the liberal legacy of two iconic Illinois senators, Adlai Stevenson III and Paul Simon, and not Jackson’s political machine. Later, as Obama went into politics, his financial support and voter base grew out of connections he made with the liberal whites he met through the church group. Obama’s experience of civil rights activism was very different from the First Movement that inspired him.
That leads to another distinction between Jackson and Obama. Unlike Jackson, Obama was not a regular in Black church pulpits. Raised by his white mother and white grandparents in Hawaii, he never sat in the pews of a Black church until college. To this day Black churches remain an engine for organizing Black voters and getting them to the polls. Obama was outside the political alliances and deals that are part of Black church history. This background set him far apart from Jackson, who was deeply connected to Black ministers and local Black politicians across the country.
When Jackson ran for president in 1984 and 1988, he forced the party to change its nominating process. He did it by putting the party on the spot by claiming it had too few Black delegates relative to the percentage of Black Democratic voters. Jackson’s point was a good one, based in fact: a racially diverse group of delegates might do a better job of selecting a presidential candidate—white or Black—able to turn out the Black vote. The party eventually reformed the delegate selection process. Then they paid for Jackson’s travel to speak for the winning candidates and allowed him to have a say in campaign staff and operations, including outreach to Black churches and spending on advertising. Jackson’s demands on the party came out of the First Civil Rights Movement’s playbook. His campaign rallies did, too. They often felt to me, as a reporter covering him, like civil rights rallies.
It was no surprise that Jackson had a speaking role at the 2004 convention. Jackson’s unquestionable political clout with Black voters commanded respect. But he was privately derided by the party’s donors and elected officials for constantly pressuring them to put more money into jobs and contracts for Black people, often beginning with checks to the Rainbow Coalition, Jackson’s organization. A lot of top Democrats considered Jackson less a civil rights player and Democrat and more like an arm-twisting extortionist. Jackson made similar demands on major corporations and Republicans. But he was most threatening to Democrats because they relied on Black votes. They lived in fear of being politically ruined if they angered Jackson to the point that he openly attacked the Democratic Party for taking Black people for granted. This fear was not unfounded, as Jackson had threatened to launch a third party for Black voters.
The surprise was that Kerry’s advisers decided to go beyond Jackson in hopes of energizing Black turnout. By giving a prime-time television slot to Obama, they doubled down on their bet. The number-one added factor with Obama, the young biracial Senate candidate, was that unlike Jackson he seemed likely to appeal to the moderate, middle-of-the-road, white voters who had proved to be the winning difference for Bill Clinton, the first two-term Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In his Senate campaign, Obama had presented himself to Illinois voters as a reasonable, thoughtful politician, a refreshing new look for American politics. He’d approached the polarizing politics of race from new angles to create an advantage for his campaign. His campaign rallies were upbeat celebrations of common-ground approaches to lift everyone, Black and white, and his avoidance of the old racial arguments proved surprisingly effective with voters. He later admitted to a reporter that he thought Black politicians too often felt compelled to prove themselves to Black voters by having to “offend white people.”8
Obama’s political calling card was as the open face—not the angry face—of a Black man. He regularly spoke of being ready to bridge racial divisions, the divide between rich and poor, and global and religious division. His speeches challenged people to see beyond stereotypes, pushing white people to take responsibility for their bias and asking Black people to acknowledge behavior that had nothing to do with race that might be holding them back—like being an absent father. It all seemed like a sensible appeal from a rational, handsome young man. He targeted the broad middle of the political spectrum, promising to repair the racial wreckage by welcoming all racial groups—whites, Blacks, Latinos—as well as all religious groups into a common, post-racial identity as Americans.
Obama personified a brilliant idea: leave behind the pressure tactics of guilt and shame and replace them with a new sense of common purpose in resolving racial injustice. Blacks and whites, Latinos and Asians, as well as liberals, conservatives, and radicals, would be brought together to give new life to a civil rights movement growing gray. Obama did not directly propose the new path. But his speeches celebrated a road on which people of all colors walked together, took responsibility for racial pain and disparities, and worked side by side in the spirit of Dr. King’s dream in which the “sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”9
Though Obama was not initially on Kerry’s radar, and Kerry was unsure about Obama, once they met it became clear that Obama’s vision filled a need for the campaign. When Kerry came to Illinois to campaign in the late spring of 2004, he agreed to make joint appearances with Obama, the party’s U.S. Senate candidate. They attracted television cameras for a tour of a job training site and a visit to a local bakery in a Black Chicago neighborhood. After a successful fundraiser for the Kerry presidential campaign, Kerry said what impressed him about Obama was the forty-two-year-old politician’s “charisma,” especially his easy, yet strong presence in the ornate Hyatt Regency ballroom filled with wealthy donors, mostly white businessmen.
After Kerry’s visit to Illinois, Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign pushed hard for a speaking slot at the convention, submitting an eight-minute video of Obama’s recent speeches with background music taken from a Muhammad Ali documentary. When Kerry’s campaign called Obama with the news that he would be delivering the keynote speech, Obama immediately told his aides, “This is pretty big.” He told reporters that his plan for the speech was to give voice to all “who want to see us move past the politics of division toward the politics of hope.”10 There was no mention of race, no reference to the Civil Rights Movement.
On the stage at Boston’s Fleet Center, Obama began his speech describing himself as the beneficiary of past civil rights activists and politicians, Black and white. He said he owed a “debt to all of those who came before me…. In no other country on earth is my story even possible.” Later he simply described himself as the beneficiary of the movement, a member of the “Joshua Generation,” the people who inherited the Bible’s promised land from the generation of Moses and Aaron.
As a journalist, I was in the convention hall awaiting Obama’s speech. His introduction by Senator Dick Durbin was lackluster. And instead of Obama’s usual walk-up music, U2’s “City of Blinding Lights,” this time he entered to soul music from the 1960s—Curtis Mayfield’s high voice singing “Keep on Pushing.” People around me kept talking as he came onstage. He thanked Durbin and praised the “great state of Illinois.” In another deft move, the young Black politician also referred to the state as “Land of Lincoln,” putting himself in line with the Great Emancipator.
Obama was unknown to most of the nation watching on television. Even I, a national political reporter, only knew of him as someone to keep an eye on, an up-and-coming Black politician from Illinois. No one told me to keep an eye on Obama as a leading man in a new civil rights movement.
But as his speech progressed, the energy in the room rose. Obama’s power to connect with people was instantly apparent as he opened by confiding in the spirit of an inside joke, “Let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely.”
Then with gratitude for America as a land of opportunity not usually heard from Black Americans, he told his story, beginning with how his father came to the United States as a student from Africa, a village in Kenya. “He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roofed shack. His father—my grandfather—was a cook, a domestic servant to the British. But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.”
Next he spoke to his roots in Midwestern small-town Kansas. His other grandfather, he said, without explicitly identifying him as a white guy, worked on farms before joining the Army and marching “across Europe” with General Patton.
By now he was connecting with white and Black people in the crowd by pointing, chopping, and waving his hands. Then he revealed a personal detail by explaining that the name given him by his Black African father and his white Kansas mother, Barack, means “blessed.” One reason they believed he was blessed, he said without a trace of irony, was that in “a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential.” Next he quoted Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father most often spoken of by Black people as having illicitly shared his bed with an enslaved Black woman. It is also true that Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and have a right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
As Obama spoke, a quiet buzz took hold of the room. Something was happening onstage. This young Black politician was expressing gratitude to America. It began when he said that “in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”
He didn’t mention race or civil rights directly, but he sent a message to white voters by knocking down stereotypes about Black politicians as only representing Black people, only loyal to the tragic elements of the Black experience. Obama was up to something different. He was talking to everyone in the audience. He wanted the vote of all Americans listening or watching. And in a peroration that became instantly famous, he proclaimed, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America: There is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America: There’s the United States of America.”11
This was a breakout speech. Obama was immediately celebrated for opening a door to a more inclusive racial vision. In that moment he revealed himself as the man, the vehicle, the vessel carrying hope for a new chapter, a new beginning in American politics—a new optimism about race relations. His Black face did not prompt anger or fear, calling up a past of slavery and racial hate with sadness and regret. He spoke with awareness of poverty, crime, and bad schools, but he projected optimism that didn’t just look at the negatives of the Black past. Obama chose to take a positive view based on how far Black people had come and where they could go. He was heralded as a racial prophet.
The speech launched Barack Obama on his way to becoming the first Black president. It also opened a new era in American politics, a new era in Black politics, and launched a Second Civil Rights Movement.
America in 2004 was a different time for civil rights and politics. It was different from 1954. It was different from 1968. In many ways, the strategies and hard-fought changes achieved by the First Civil Rights Movement had run their course.
When Obama spoke in 2004, racial tensions remained, but there had also been real progress, notably in the growth of the Black middle class; the marches and sit-ins of the 1950s and 1960s were present only as celebrated history. It had been fifty years since the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the ruling that rang the bell to start the First Civil Rights Movement. A half century later, the high court’s call to end segregated schools had become a messy proposition, often unfulfilled, with most Black children still in de facto segregated schools, producing test scores inferior to those of white children.
Standing before the convention, Obama did not harp on the First Movement’s loss of direction, or the fraying of the consensus about a strategy for achieving more racial progress. He did not stick a knife in the glorious First Civil Rights Movement by identifying his emergence as the end of the road for the old civil rights era. He never labeled his seventeen-minute speech or himself as post-racial, although they were widely viewed as just that.
But Obama’s presence on the national stage signified racial progress. He made it acceptable to dream and to talk about a post-racial era. The biracial young man, so classy and so distant from the time of slavery, segregation, sit-ins, and sad sermons on separatism, ignited a rush of news stories, essays, columns, academic conferences, and public debates on a post-racial America. And it did not matter if people saw Obama through white eyes or Black eyes. In either case they saw something new.
He was seen as rising above the same old exhausting racial arguments. He held mythic potential as a new Dr. King come to lead a wandering generation. Black and white Americans alike seemed to agree on Obama as the flesh-and-blood reality of the First Civil Rights Movement’s pledge to produce exemplary Black people who would shame racists by demonstrating their intellect, integrity, and patriotism equal to any other American. People delighted in seeing Obama as that hero blazing a new frontier, taking them into a better world of race relations.
This collective sensation was taking place even though Obama never presented himself as post-racial or as a “race man,” a description embraced by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Dr. King. Those leaders earned that honorary title by standing up for Black people against their enemies. That was not Obama. He had a different frame of thinking. He wanted to make enemies into friends and then into votes that would put him in office. He didn’t directly confront racial injustice because it would not help him win votes. In part, that’s because racial arguments were background noise—not a hot topic for debate—during the 2004 campaign cycle.
The major event for all Americans, but especially Black Americans, that had put talk about racial justice on the back burner was the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. More than 2,900 Americans died, most of them in the towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Alarm and outrage mixed with constant anxiety over the possibility of more attacks inspired fear that sank deep into every region of the nation. It led the federal government to reorganize itself to improve homeland security. It also led the country into two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The 9/11 attacks did ignite new arguments over civil rights, but they were about the violation of Muslim Americans’ civil liberties. By the time of Obama’s speech, the country had spent nearly three years searching for hidden terrorist cells, anxious about the prospect of another attack. FBI surveillance of Muslims extended to all recent immigrants, and any dark-skinned person, anyone with an accent, risked being seen as a potential terrorist. Racial justice and civil rights groups put their energy into standing up to bias against Muslims and Middle Easterners.
In his speech, Obama picked up on this concern. “If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties,” he said, generating one of the biggest roars to come from the crowd.
As he neared the end of his convention speech Obama had to speak over chants of “Obama, Obama, Obama” from the delegates. Near closing, he delivered a line that would follow him far beyond politics: “The audacity of hope.”
“In the end that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation… a belief that there are better days ahead… America! Tonight, if you feel the same energy that I do, if you feel the same urgency I do, if you feel the same passion that I do… then I have no doubt that… out of this long political darkness, a brighter day will come.”12
Michelle, his wife, dressed in white, flowed onstage to hug him. Senator Durbin and his wife followed. The crowd roared and the arena vibrated. It was upbeat, inspiring to so many who sought a break from the negative, cynical politics of the day and a new window on racial politics.
One intriguing result of the success of Obama’s speech was that his ongoing campaign for the U.S. Senate took a backseat nationally to talk about him as a future president. He had been a strong favorite to win the Senate race before the convention. A sex scandal had eliminated his Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, a former investment banker who reportedly had pressed his former wife, an actress, to go to “sex clubs and… engage in sexual activity in front of other patrons.”13 With Ryan out of the race, the Illinois Republican Party had reached out for a celebrity to run against Obama. But Mike Ditka, the former coach of the Chicago Bears, said no. Republicans then went out of state, courting a Black conservative radio talk show host. Alan Keyes, who lived in Maryland, transferred his residence to Illinois and registered as a candidate. He made headlines by saying that Jesus and every good Catholic in Illinois couldn’t vote for Obama because the Democrat supported a woman’s right to abortion.
Mary Mitchell, a Black Chicago Sun-Times columnist, called out the Republicans for turning the Senate race into a fight between two Black men. “So, what happened to all the white lambs?” she wrote. “Why aren’t they being sacrificed.” Again, Obama was being identified as Black, countered by a Black candidate, and celebrated as a singular Black politician. Political conversation had reverted to predictable patterns.14
But after the convention speech that seemed to transcend race, Obama’s Blackness proved a positive by calling attention to him as a “cool” politician, a unique political entity with newfound potential to go all the way to the White House. In November he won with the biggest margin of victory for anyone—Black or white—in state history, taking 70 percent of the vote. At the victory party his fans chanted, “Yes, We Can,” a slogan full of racial context that would follow him the rest of his political career.
Despite his emphasis on diversity, when he arrived in the Senate in January 2005 most of the media coverage focused on the fact that he was the only Black U.S. senator. He was only the fifth African American ever to serve in the Senate (and only the third to get there via a popular election). On his office walls he hung portraits of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and South Africa’s iconic racial healer and president, Nelson Mandela.
Senate Democratic leadership gave the newcomer with no seniority a prized seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, where he worked well with Republicans. He traveled to Russia with Richard Lugar, a senior Republican senator from Indiana. He co-sponsored an immigration reform bill with John McCain, the nationally known Arizona Republican. Lots of photos appeared of Obama and another Republican senator, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. The attention to their partnership sent a political message that might have been staged but was certainly strategic. There was a good vibe, a mutually politically advantageous message, in promoting partnerships between the older white men and the young Black guy.
To fit into the Senate, Obama stayed away from cameras in his first months in Washington. The big exception came in August 2005, after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the heavily Black population in the flood zone. Still, Obama tried to stay above the racial static, even as it gathered into lightning bolts of anger. “There’s been much attention in the press about the fact that those who were left behind in New Orleans were disproportionately poor and African American,” he said, coolly distancing himself from that perspective. The only heated comment from him was to characterize the ineffective federal response: “The ineptitude was colorblind.” He also called attention to the poverty, not the race, of those in crisis, people unable to “load up their family in an SUV, fill it up with $100 worth of gasoline, stick some bottled water in the trunk, and use a credit card to check into a hotel on safe ground.”15
When Obama announced in February 2007 that he was running for president, speaking from the top of the steps leading to the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, he quoted Lincoln as having declared from the same location in 1858 that slavery was evil and that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” He was beginning his campaign to be the first Black president by presenting himself as a modern-day Abraham Lincoln, a man looking to heal the current divide in the nation. He spoke about the “smallness of our politics” and identified America’s biggest problem as a surfeit of skepticism and cynicism; people no longer believed in talking about hope.16
Whereas Jesse Jackson’s campaign events in the 1980s had the feel of an old civil rights rally, with lots of reminiscing about the old days, the Obama events felt like rock concerts, attracting a younger, racially diverse crowd. The rhetoric invited people to try something new, to get a new movement started to deal with reality in the new century.
Obama knew his rhetoric signaled a change for Black listeners. “In the history of African American politics in this country there has always been some tension between speaking in universal [human rights] terms and speaking in very race-specific terms about the plight of the African American community. By virtue of my background, you know, I am more likely to speak in universal terms.”17
Obama was a surprise winner in the first contest of the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, the Iowa caucuses. I was in Iowa the night of his victory to do television commentary, and I cried on the air. I explained to viewers that it was incredible for me as a Black man to realize that a Black candidate had won Iowa, a state with nearly all white voters. It was the start of Obama’s run through the Democratic primaries.
The key contest would be in South Carolina, a state where most of the Democratic primary voters were Black. The state’s leading Black political leaders had initially backed Senator Hillary Clinton, but Obama’s success in Iowa had created the potential for a Black president, a new movement for social change.
Most civil rights veterans and Black politicians remained distant from Obama. They strongly supported Senator Hillary Clinton as the campaign got going. The Reverend Al Sharpton, after meeting with Obama in January 2008, said that he “left the meeting a little curious, feeling that he was noticing our civil rights agenda, but I didn’t understand what his civil rights agenda is.” Sharpton said that Clinton had “more of a civil rights program laid out…. I always know where I stand with her.”18 But the old guard soon began to feel pressure from Black voters’ excitement about Obama.
At that point, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton had not endorsed Obama. “People don’t know who he is,” said Ron Walters, a top adviser to Jackson and a former dean of political science at Howard University who at the time ran the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland. “They don’t know his record. They don’t know his background…. He has to win their vote like anyone else.”19 As the campaign for the South Carolina primary heated up, Bill Clinton was frustrated by his wife’s lack of traction with Black voters there. He pointed out, testily, that an Obama victory in South Carolina, with its large Black population, would simply match the success of an earlier Black candidate, Jesse Jackson, and did not reflect anything special about Obama. “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice,” he said dismissively.20
Obama’s supporters took offense at the idea that he was attracting Black voters simply because he was Black. Bill Clinton then accused Obama’s campaign of having “played the race card on me.”21
Andrew Young, a former top aide to Dr. King, was among the veterans of the First Civil Rights Movement who were slow to back the Obama campaign. He took President Clinton’s side when it was suggested that Clinton was being dismissive of a Black man. “Bill is every bit as Black as Barack,” Young said at a public political forum. “He’s probably gone with more Black women than Barack.”22
This in turn stirred more arguments about Obama’s racial identity. Did he represent a new generation of Black people in American life, with ties beyond the history and life of the Civil Rights Movement, Black culture, and climbing the ladder of success as a Black political leader?
“We claim him, and we are proud of him,” Young later said. “But the fact is that he has not had the experiences of deprivation, humiliation, and racism that I had to grow up with—which is good. He has the label without the scars.”23
During the South Carolina primary campaign, Jackson criticized Obama for not speaking out in support of Black high school students in Jena, Louisiana, who had been charged with assault and attempted murder after a fight with a white student. Civil rights activists described the “Jena Six” case as symbolizing how Black teenagers faced harsh criminal penalties that their white counterparts generally avoided. Obama’s failure to be “bold” about the Jena case led Jackson to say publicly that Obama was “acting like he’s white.”
“If I were a candidate, I’d be all over Jena,” Jackson said in a speech to a Black audience in South Carolina before the primary. Jackson said Jena was a “defining moment, just like Selma was a defining moment.”24
In another sharp contrast with older civil rights leaders like Jackson, Obama described the tense situation in the small Southern town in racially neutral language. “Outrage over an injustice like the Jena Six isn’t a matter of Black and white,” Obama said. “It is a matter of right and wrong.” This was a clear illustration of Obama’s break from the First Movement.25
In Jackson’s world, Obama was a sweet-hearted, childish political figure, feebly floating above racial realities, ignoring the tension between Black and white on the ground. Jackson set Obama further adrift when he added that Hurricane Katrina and the Jena Six case made “America’s unresolved moral dilemma of race unavoidable.”26
It may well have been unavoidable for Jackson and his old-school Black politics—but not so for Obama, whose idealism on race led him to see the uproar in Jena as a reason for people of all colors to come together to help each other heal by being fair to all sides. Obama’s assertion of a common American identity across racial lines managed to survive the crisis and became a hallmark of his campaign. When a charge of aggravated assault was dismissed by a state appeals court, Obama said he was glad to see the court recognize that the charge was “inappropriate.” He expressed “hope that the judicial process will move deliberately to ensure that all of the defendants will receive a fair trial and equal justice under law.”27
In February, the Georgia primary saw 90 percent of Black voters backing Obama. By late February, Representative John Lewis, the civil rights activist celebrated for having stood up in Selma, Alabama, to a bloody attack from state troopers while marching for voting rights, announced he was dropping his support for Clinton and joining Obama’s campaign. Lewis released a statement that praised Obama as “the beginning of a new movement in American political history,” and he now realized he wanted to be a part of it and “on the side of the people.”28 That meant that Lewis, a superdelegate with a vote independent of the outcome of the caucus or primary in any state, would vote for Obama at the Democratic Party’s national nominating convention.
John Lewis was upset about these divisions among Black politicians over the young Black man from Hawaii. He told his fellow congressman South Carolina’s Jim Clyburn that there was a chance to see the fruit of all they had worked for if Obama won the White House. Following Obama’s victory in South Carolina and Georgia, Jesse Jackson finally endorsed the Illinois senator at the end of March, but he did it in a telephone interview with the Associated Press, not in a public appearance. The old guard was still wary of the new champion.
In a revealing wrinkle, Reverend Jackson’s son, Jesse Jackson Jr., a congressman from Illinois, became an Obama supporter before his father did. The younger Jackson put Obama’s relationship to Black voters in the context of a next generation of Black leaders. He described Obama as an “inheritor” of his father’s Rainbow Coalition, implying that Obama had to deal with the politics of a more diverse, less segregated America. Obama, he said, was talking to white people about doing better by Black people and talking to Black people about the need to expand Black political identity. That meant Obama needed support from Black politicians to “not limit him to a segment of the population,” by attacking him when he spoke critically of Black people.
The difference between the younger Jackson and his father was evidence of the friction between young and old in Black America—the First and Second Movements. “When my father ran for president in ’84 and ’88, it was all for the legacy and a history from 1960 to the time he announced his candidacy in 1984 on speaking to issues of civil rights and social justice for African Americans primarily,” Jesse Jackson Jr. said, pointing out that his father “started with an African American base.”29
The senior Jackson expressed discontent with Obama’s tendency to distinguish himself from older Black politicians—specifically by being willing to discuss high out-of-wedlock birth rates and absent Black fathers as pervasive problems in the Black community. Despite Jackson Sr.’s endorsement, he later, in unguarded comments captured by a live microphone on a cable television set, let loose. “I want to cut his nuts out,” he said. “Barack is talking down to Black people.” A day later, Jackson issued a forced apology.30
Obama’s defining moment before a Black audience came in Selma, where he linked himself to the heroic effort of civil rights activists (like John Lewis) who marched for voting rights but were beaten by state troopers in 1965. It is because they marched, Obama said, that he “got a law degree, a seat in the Illinois Senate, and ultimately in the United States Senate.” He told the story of people at a breakfast meeting that morning. They asked him if he saw himself as a Black American. They pointed to his father being African and his mother white, neither coming from slavery nor living through the U.S. history of legal racial segregation.
Obama’s response reset the terms of the question. What happened in Selma, Birmingham, and other sites of civil rights history, he explained, opened the door for his father to come to America and for his mother to identify with people standing for racial justice. “So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma…. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama…. I’m here because you all sacrificed for me.” He made an analogy between the leaders of the earlier civil rights era and Moses, the biblical figure, who led his people to freedom. “The previous generation, the Moses generation, pointed the way. They took us 90 percent of the way there. We still got that 10 percent to cross over to the other side…. So the question… is what is called of us in this Joshua generation?” In that moment, Obama paid homage and respect to the First Movement but also separated himself from that past.31
As he held the lead through the primaries, Obama tactfully avoided debates on current racial issues. Then a past relationship with a Black minister became public, setting off a firestorm. Videotapes showed Obama’s Chicago minister, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, lambasting America as a nation built on racist lies. The fiery Wright was seen in his pulpit calling the Founding Fathers liars. He said their real belief was only that “all white men were created equal.” He added that white America continued to treat Blacks unfairly and emphasized that the federal government had an ongoing role in holding Black people down. “The government gives them the drugs,” he said. “Builds bigger prisons… and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America… for treating our citizens as less than human.”32
Critics said that Obama had sat in Wright’s church for years and never objected to his minister shouting out such racial anger. Obama claimed he never heard it. Inside the Democratic Party and among Black political leaders there was real fear that Obama’s campaign had suffered a fatal blow. Hillary Clinton surged ahead of him in the polls. The damning question for Obama was whether he would stay loyal to the church or turn his back on his minister and, by association, turn his back on Black people.
To regain his balance on the high wire of racial controversies, Obama went to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, near the iconic imagery of Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, to speak on the topic. He began by reminding his audience that voters are “hungry… for this message of unity.”
He noted that some people saw him as “too Black” or “not Black enough.” Recounting his personal experience, he said that his white grandmother, who raised him, had spoken of her fear of Black men. Similarly, he said that Reverend Wright had condemned all whites. He then said that he loved both the man who introduced him to his Christian faith and the woman who lovingly raised him. His goal was to bring them to see each other honestly. He pointed to the cynicism of white conservatives who saw his campaign as “based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.”
Only then did he speak directly to Wright’s most controversial comments. He said his minister’s call to damn America was “profoundly distorted.” Wright sees “white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America… as if no progress had been made; as if this country, a country that made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and Black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old, is still irrevocably bound to its tragic past.”
He concluded by saying, “Not this time.” This moment, his campaign, he said, was a time to celebrate “every color and creed who serve together and fight together and bleed together under the same proud flag.”33
Obama’s poll numbers immediately rebounded. “Barack Obama’s March 18th speech on race and politics is arguably the biggest political event of the campaign so far,” Pew Research reported. “Fully 85 percent of Americans say they heard at least a little about Obama’s speech, and most (54 percent) say they heard a lot about it.”34
Black voters overwhelmingly stayed with him, and while moderate white voters came back more slowly, a significant percentage said that the episode gave them a more favorable impression of Obama, the speech having indicated that he would not carry the burden of racial hate.
Obama went on to win the Democratic nomination. The unknown young man who was a surprise hit at the 2004 convention was now the party’s celebrated nominee, a hero poised to open new, positive dimensions in American race relations. But at his own convention in 2008, race was not at the center of his acceptance speech. Instead, he spoke about average people trying to pay their bills, get health care, and take care of their children in an unsteady economy. Obama painted himself as a man in touch with “Main Street” concerns, the antithesis of the powerful players on Wall Street or in Washington. He briefly acknowledged that he was delivering this speech on the forty-fifth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, recalling “Americans from every corner of this land” crowding together before the Lincoln Memorial, and the common embrace they had experienced. He repeated King’s words: “We cannot walk alone.”35
In November 2008, Obama won a clear victory in the general election, and the Black turnout set a record; for the first time in history, a higher percentage of Black voters went to the polls than white voters. Appearing before a massive crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park, Obama became the center of a sea of emotion. Jesse Jackson, a longtime critic of the younger man, was seen crying as he listened to the nation’s first Black president-elect. But once again Obama had nothing to say with regard to racial problems in the country or a new era in race relations. Rather, he deftly pointed to the history of past racial struggles as inspiration. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”36
Obama never said he would be a post-racial president. But his victory, with its roots in his celebrated 2004 convention speech, signaled that a new era of race relations had begun. In his inaugural address he said: “For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness…. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass.”37