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The Last Lap
Historian Sean Wilentz talks to Jesse Jackson and civil-rights veterans about their awe of—and tensions with—the Obama campaign.
“I’ve been able to see our nation get better,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson muses, in joyful anticipation of Barack Obama’s impending presidential victory. Jackson is reflecting on what he called “sixty years of battles to democratize democracy.” Tuesday’s results, he tells me, will mark a great victory, moving toward “a triumph over the deepest sin in the American soul.” Decades of protest and reform can now give way to a new phase of what he called “bridge building,” with Obama standing squarely at the moral center of the American dream.
There is a note of elegy in Jackson’s remarks, but also pride and determination, all of which would have seemed surprising only a few months ago. Throughout the long primary and general election season, reports have surfaced of deep tensions between the Obama campaign and the veterans of the civil rights movement. Many of the most respected deacons of the African-American community—including Andrew Young, Congressman John Lewis, and Bob Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television—began the presidential year supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Lewis, after citing his Atlanta district’s preferences, switched to Obama before the primaries ended, around the time members of the Obama campaign were reportedly pressuring other black officials to fall into line.) Early in the campaign, Young and Johnson came under attack from Obama’s most ardent supporters—on skimpy evidence—for allegedly making derogatory and even racially-charged remarks about Obama.
In some ways, Jackson says, Obama’s new electoral coalition represents the fulfillment of “my whole idea about the Rainbow Coalition.”
Although Jesse Jackson was always publicly in Obama’s camp, he was also caught on videotape muttering nasty things about the candidate, claiming that Obama was talking down to black people. When Jackson’s son, Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., Obama’s national co-chairman, publicly dressed down his father for his gaffe, it seemed emblematic of the division between the old folks and the youngbloods.
The hard feelings have apparently disappeared, at least for the moment, among the veterans. After talking with a small but politically diverse group of older black activists, one is struck instead by their descriptions of the awe they feel at what is about to happen—an event some of them barely imagined they would live long enough to see. Although they still talk about anxieties and misgivings, these get dwarfed by the grandeur of the moment.
For most African-Americans, Bob Johnson says, Obama’s election is akin to the Second Coming. Johnson seems to be only marginally less expectant himself, telling me that Obama’s ascendancy “could have more significance than the Emancipation Proclamation” if it transforms “the way African-Americans see themselves and the way white Americans see themselves in relation to African-Americans.” Regardless of whom they supported early in the campaign, Johnson and others give Obama credit for making it all happen.
Of course, they observe, Obama was blessed as well as beset by his Republican adversaries. Over the years, Jesse Jackson says, the Republicans have “pushed off” so many large groups of Americans—youth, labor, blacks, women—that they have “pushed themselves into a corner” and made themselves “officially a minority party.” Then came the current administration, with all its disasters culminating in the financial collapse. The activist and great comic entertainer, Dick Gregory—who himself ran for president in 1968 as a write-in candidate on the anti-war Freedom and Peace Party line—credits two people above all for electing Obama to the presidency: the civil rights martyr Jimmie Lee Jackson, whose slaying in 1965 sparked the momentous Selma, Alabama, voting rights marches; and President George W. Bush. (“Bush messed up white folks so bad,” Gregory jokes, “many of them say, ‘god-dang, I’m supposed to vote for a Negro.’”)
Still, Obama has had to walk what Jackson calls “a very thin line” to win the trust of the rest of the electorate, especially in the general election. This is why Jackson now says it is “unfair” to criticize Obama for failing to acknowledge more fully his debts to the civil rights pioneers as he runs what Jackson has called “the last lap of a 54-year marathon race.” Doing so, he contends, might have allowed “the enemies of change” to distract attention from Obama’s agenda, which he takes to be basically liberal/progressive. Obama’s racial background was perfectly obvious. By neither denying nor dwelling on it, Jackson contends, Obama ran a “delicate but smart” campaign.
Yet for all of his vaunted charisma and no matter how much the political press adores him, Obama could not have won over so many non-black voters unless the nation itself had already changed. In some ways, Jackson says, Obama’s new electoral coalition represents the fulfillment of “my whole idea about the Rainbow Coalition.” But now America is ready for that idea—largely, it seems, because of continuing social transformations during what some scholars have mislabeled the post-civil rights era. All along, since 1965, changes were occurring that were greater, Dick Gregory claims, than even the old movement heavies had imagined. “All of them old-time civil rights leaders that knew that it ain’t [time] yet, they hadn’t been in tune with this new piece out here.”
Young whites are a major part of the change. “Most white baby boomers have taught their children that you cannot live in that past that our parents kept us in,” Bob Johnson says. “You’ve got to be open, you’ve got to accept.” Jesse Jackson, returning to his favorite metaphor, agrees: “Once the walls came down, we could see each other and become roommates and work with each other and play ball with each other.” Sports, music, fashion, entertainers—all have done the work of acculturation that, above and beyond obtaining simple justice, was always the goal of racial integration. (Gregory, the entertainer, demurs on this, saying that while comics and satirists helped “change the whole mind set” by saying “’Hold on, the avalanche is coming,’” the movement, and later voters and public officials of good will, did what really counted.)
The country is also far less narrow-minded and knee-jerk today than it was regarding dissent. “When Dr. King said he was against the Vietnam War, he was accused of treason,” Jackson remembers. “Barack says he’s against the Iraq war and people say, ‘You make sense.’” And of course, there is the historical reckoning on race. Bob Johnson senses that many white Americans want somehow, at long last, to exorcise the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow—an atonement, Johnson says, “proving to themselves, intellectually and emotionally: ‘I am not a racist.’” Although Johnson insists that Obama has not run as “the redeeming black candidate,” it is obvious to anyone who has paid attention that his campaign has turned that sense of racial guilt and symbolic redemption to its enormous benefit.
Early in the campaign, some critics doubted whether Obama’s background made him “black” enough to carry the burden of the nation’s racial past. There are also some ironies, both despite and because of his bi-racial heritage, about how Obama has battened on the tempered optimism of integrationist civil rights. Obama’s search for personal identity has had its twists and turns; and he has not described all of them in his two books. In one of those turns, in 1995, he took a time out from his first campaign for the Illinois state legislature in order to attend Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March in Washington, D.C.—an event Stanley Crouch has written about as “the nadir of black nationalism.” Neither curiosity nor the machinations of South Side Chicago politics can fully explain why Obama was there, any more than they can explain his decades’ long attachment to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Still, even if Obama, like the rest of us, is a work in progress, the civil rights veterans seem to see his impending victory as a refutation of the persistent anti-integrationist pessimism about America, whether advocated by the Nation of Islam, the Aryan Nation, or sanctimonious white liberals who have assumed that ordinary white Americans would never truly embrace a black candidate. (As matters stand, Obama is poised to win a greater percentage of the white vote than either John Kerry, Al Gore, or Bill Clinton.)
The veterans caution that hard work still awaits, to insure and then consolidate the breakthrough. After the Emancipation Proclamation, Jackson recalls, “it took us three years to get to the Thirteenth Amendment” which abolished slavery; “then it took us three years to get to Reconstruction—and then that got cancelled.” Revolutions in American life can always go backwards. And Obama, whose political skills far outstrip his experience, still has a long way to go to prove himself as a Chief Executive capable of confronting two wars and a world financial order that is in collapse.
Bob Johnson says he lies awake at night worrying that the “huge euphoria of expectations” will crash and burn if Obama does not prove successful from the get-go. In an odd way, Obama’s being perceived as black will, Johnson says, buy him some time, as any hasty criticism can easily be deflected as racially motivated. But Obama’s supporters can go only so far in ascribing bad faith and hidden bigotry to his adversaries, as they did during the primaries, lest American politics become racialized in the nastiest possible way.
The odds are that something grave will happen sooner rather than later. The financial crisis all but guarantees as much, which raises alarms in Jesse Jackson’s mind: “If Santa comes but the house has been foreclosed, he can’t come down the chimney.” Indeed, there are nagging fears that winning the presidency, in 2008, will turn out to be winning a booby prize. “It’s like the dog that catches the car,” Bob Johnson chuckles mordantly. “I got it, now what am I gonna do with it?” There is little reason, he adds, to believe that Obama and the Congressional leadership are in synch, bearing plans and programs to meet the current emergencies.
Then again, Dick Gregory cracks, as far as the mossbacks are concerned “the worst thing that can happen when Obama wins, he hurries up and solves this financial crisis, and a white boy can’t run for president for another hundred years.” Besides, it is an iron rule of politics than winning is always better than losing; and winning big is always better than winning small. Whatever their abiding misapprehensions, the old lions of civil rights appear to be reveling in the historical deliverance which they now say they see in Barack Obama’s triumph. Listening to Jesse Jackson now, one could easily fall into envisaging these days around November 4 as a world-historic moment, fed by a torrent that has rushed from Selma, Alabama in 1965 to Berlin in 1989, walls falling everywhere, new bridges being made out of the rubble from those walls—a crescendo of hope and change mightier than any campaign slogan, based on the hard history of an entire nation.
Jackson can make his point softly, too: “We learn to survive apart. We learn to live together. More and more, every day.” Or so, at least, it seems right now.
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I think that a lot of these black leaders are finally coming around and acknowledging the significance of Barack Obama's nomination and possible presidency. I am an African American woman, as well as an Obama supporter and I can honestly say that whether Obama wins or loses there has been a huge shift in racial beliefs and ideas, and practices here in America.
In regards to a lot of these older activists and leaders of the civil rights movement and social issues....I feel that that they too are grappling with these events and are starting to accept that things really have changed in America. I do not believe that just becasue you are black that you have to be an Obama supporter; and it is fair to constructively criticize him. But some of the criticism that Obama caught from Bob Johnson, Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson and plenty others was uncalled for. I personally felt that many of them did not want to let go of the torches that they carried. They did not want to pass on that banner and let young, educated, post Jim Crow black leaders pick up the cause. Bob Johnson made horrible remarks that were uncalled for, and considering that debacle he calls a television channel (BET), he really needs to check himself. BET is his legacy whether he still owns it or not. Jesse Jackson made off the cuff remarks that were really scathing, there were other leaders that questioned Obama'a "blackness"....it was a sad case of reversal, blacks tearing down other black people which is unfortunate.
I think they too need to look at themselves when it the context of "the dog chasing the car". If Barack Obama does win the presidency, it will be, in a sense, that everything those leaders have been waiting for finally happens....and now they will have to figure out what there place is in terms of American politics. I am in no way saying that if Obama wins, racism will not exist and that all problems that inner city black youth face will dissapper....NO WAY! These will still be issues. What I am saying is that the conversation of black life, youth, politics, social issues will have to be more progressive. And it will be time for these older black leaders to start inviting more young leaders to the table to confront these issues.
There are voters in Florida who, as young college students, sat down at segregated lunch counters to earn for Mr. Obama his opportunities tomorrow.
When they went to vote this January, they experienced being told that their vote shouldn't count, not by Jim Crow race haters as was the case in their youth, but by the first viable African-American presidential candidate.
Later Obama said the votes couldn't count because it wasn't "fair" to him for them to count, and still later Obama said the votes could count if he got to say how they were cast--an "acceptable formula," he called it . That is indeed what finally happened, only a party committee did it.
All of this was OK with all of these former civil rights leaders turned important, influential and even powerful national figures four decades later.
If the Civil Rights Movement was not about having all Americans' votes count, what was it about?
How do we distinguish between these men this year and Bull Connor in 1960: In both cases some Americans votes were not allowed to count because it served somebody in power's political purpose. Connor was indeed a race hater, but these men were just indifferent.
Should votes ever be voided in a representative democracy? Should politicians negotiate over whether some American's vote will be counted or not? Should party committees decide who counts, who counts how much and who doesn't count at all?
Didn't Mr. Obama participate in a repudiation of the notion that government should be accountable to the people: that the vote is the only real link between the people and the government?
Isn't having a grandmother, who risked beatings in her youth for civil rights, going to the polls to cast a ballot already voided by a party committee a sin against democracy, civil rights and all that our fathers and mothers sacrificed to bring about a just nation?
These once idealistic men didn't even notice the vote voiding as a civil rights issue. They happened not to be the victims this time. Indeed, some of them are public officials who could pass laws to ensure that one-person one-vote applies in presidential elections as well as to House, state and local elections.
They stand in Bull Conner's shoes today. Now that they are not the victims, let's see if they use their prestige and power to protect others from having their votes voided in 2012?
If you give thought to current situations, here and abroad, you already understand the darkness into which Obama will enter as he walks into the Office (ah, knock wood). I think we will keep trust with him...the majority who vote for him.
A good piece!
Very interesting read. A friend of mine sent me this text over the weekend. Rosa Sat so MLK could walk, MLK walked so Obama could run, Obama is running so all of our children can soar.
State by State list of time off to vote laws
http://employmentlawpost.com/theword/2008/10/15/time-off-to-vote-for-em ployees-a-state-by-state-survey-2/
Employee election crush on Nov. 4
http://employmentlawpost.com/theword/2008/10/31/time-off-to-vote-employ ee-voting-crush-on-november-4/
The primary that was held in Florida is not as black and white as you paint it Issywise. Florida moved its primary up with an ok from Gov. Charlie Crist even though they were told that if the primary was moved up, the votes would not count. This is something that all of the candidates agreed with. Where were the civil rights leaders and voting rights activists during the time that the governor of Florida agreed to move the primaries up? Where was all of the noise before the residents of Florida cast their votes?
There were a lot of different issues at play with that Florida primary. That situation provides one of many examples of why there need to be drastic changes in the American voting process.
Sean - great article. I will say that Bob Johnson is hated in many corners of our community.
It funny that he's worry about the perceptions of Blacks...many of us see him as a Judas-like figure. His disgusting programming hurt us more than anything Obama could ever do. Sorry to derail the discussion, but I had to mention that.
Assuming Obama wins, thank God Hillary didn't get the nomination, It's incomparably more important for America, and the world, for a black man to win this election than for a white woman. There's simply no comparison in terms of historical significance, whatever Hillary die-hards might claim. Black women were overwhelmingly for Obama over Hillary. It was only white women who were such feminist dead-enders that they preferred the more limited revolution for social justice of electing a woman to that of electing a black man. If Obama wins, it will be a truly incomparable landmark for America, greater than King's "I have a dream" speech itself, as the actualization of power is always greater than dreaming and rhetoric about achieving it,
Assuming Obama wins, I think the most interesting thing that will happen is the long succession of things that won't, thus leaving unfulfilled the ludicrous paranoid prophesies of so many who have opposed Obama from day one of his candidacy. His presidency may serve as a major myth-buster, this occurring quietly and implicitly over time, until he is seen as a normal, if extraordinarily gifted, American, and others similarly situated will be freer to rise to what heights they may.
lolagib1
It WAS as black and white as I said: The vote to move Florida's primary date was one vote shy of unanimous in the legislature--bipartisan in the extreme. The RNC had made exactly the same threat the DNC had made--to void votes. The change was done to confront and reject the parties' assertion that they control primary dates. .
The gormless DNC doubled-down its bets to full disenfranchisement to scare Michigan, which moved its date anyhow--to make the same point: parties won't tell free Americans when to vote.
You prove my point that this is a civil rights issue. You think the candidates can agree and dictates when voters vote. You probably also saw nothing wrong with them negotiating over whose vote should count and even ultimately deciding how they voted.
State legislatures have the exclusive legal power to set primary dates because primaries cost tens of millions of tax dollars, involve tens of thousands of paid government employees and volunteers and are conducted under thousands of state and scores of federal laws. Primaries cast over the presidential candidate selection process a cloak of legitimacy and fairness at the expense of the public taxpayer and by the operation of laws intended to protect votes..
You endorse political party bosses deciding which voters' votes should count. You didn't hear any "noise" before the primary and so think the vote voiding wasn't important?
I respectfully suggest you didn't hear anything because your head was up your citizenship fanny. But you are in good company: all the so-called civil rights leaders discussed in this article were right with you.
During Jim Crow, some Americans were told they couldn't couldn't count in American elections. The same thing happened this year. The 2008 Democratic Party is the greatest mass disenfranchiser of voters in American history save only eight decades of Jim Crow. As with Jim Crow, the citizens who didn't count didn't count because people with the power decided it served their political purposes to void the votes of some American-----2.7 million of them and you missed hearing any noise. So too did John Lewis and his colleagues.
You were all blind to the rights of some Americans, just like the all the people on the sidelines when Jim Crow ruled., just like Bull Connor.
One-person one-vote, by law for every American election solves this problem and vindicates all the values embodied in worlds like "all men created equal" and "equal protection" under the law.
If you pick and choose where those values should apply to suit the political advantages of your preferred candidate, you are just like Bull Connor.
Bob Johnson is in no way a deacon of the black community, any more than Larry Flynt is a deacon of the white community. Both got rich peddling filth. Your assertions discredits your whole article, in my view.
To me, and many others, Johnson is the ultimate sellout. I don't even think a black president can reverse the symbolic damage to the black male image that BET has done.
If you are going to continue to obsess over the racism of Black America( as you did so much during the Obama/Clinton primary), it is best not to use two world class anti-semites and the nastiest anti-black female smut peddler in the history of this nation as contrasting forms of black leadership.
Issywise......you need to chill out on the Bull Conner references in regards to me. I never once said that just because of the fiasco that happened in Florida that those votes should not have counted. I simply stated that there should have been more fuss made during that process instead of dealing with the issues after the fact, which made it look like partisan politics. So no, the issue was not black and white...politics is never black and white.
Also, don't "respectfully" suggest anything to me using insults. I do not mind that you state your opinion and your views that differ from mine; that is more than fine. This forum lends itself to that discourse. But do not compare me to the Bull Conners of the world, and don't make assumptions about who I voted for and even if you do, learn to have a little more class.
Sorry, didn't mean to personally offend.
Since this is a forum for discourse, can you distinguish this year's vote voiding from Jim Crow's? I don't think it unfair to say you and these veteran civil rights heroes are complacent on the vote voiding this year--not even seeing the vote voiding as a civil rights matter at all: How come?
On what principle is this year's mass disenfranchisement acceptable and Jim Crow's not?
Issywise....
I never stated that the Florida voters were not cheated. I simply said that the issue was not as black and white as you suggested. I also stated that not enough fuss was made about this very important issue before the Florida primary elections. I am not complicit with these certain leaders who wanted to disenfranchise Florida voters so please stop lumping me in that category.
Once again, I stated that not enough ppl in positions of power voiced their opinions. I would have voted during that primary if I lived in Florida so and I do not believe that this is the fault of the voters. This was the fault of a shoddy voting process that needs to be addressed. That is the argument that I made fromt the beginning.
Why is Sean asking Bob Johnson what he thinks about BO. He's only a money maker. Scratch him from the inerview list please.
I don't have a big picture perspective; I can say that a young man who might've only walked right past me earlier, tonight said something to me--to test me, to tease me, whatever--that he might not have before this magnificent event. One tiny change, but a change nonetheless. A corner turned, and for the best.
Thank you.
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