Barack Obama strove to avoid race as a defining issue for his campaign. Part of this was pragmatic; running as an explicitly “Black” candidate would have hurt his electability beyond the racial silo, not because of racism per se but rather because tying yourself to any one identity too strongly by necessity pushes other identities further away. The Reverend Wright affair forced Obama’s hand, but even then he did not acknowledge race so much as retire it. The speech on race he gave was perhaps a defining moment in American politics, the seed for a post-racial future ideal, a triumph by any definition – and yet also, another successful changing of the topic away from race. <\/p>\n
In fact even as Obama prepares to take the oath of office tomorrow, the day after a national holiday honoring the dream of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. of which Obama is the literal manifestation, Obama still seeks to minimize the racial aspect of his historic victory<\/a>:<\/p>\n Barack Obama will have a rival for the spotlight at Tuesday’s Inauguration: the nation’s First Black President. <\/p>\n The swearing-in of the country’s first-ever African-American But aside from the inescapable — the location of the Lincoln Memorial, “We’ve tried to make sure that from the people’s point of view, this is This is the right thing to do – history itself will do its part in framing Obama within the arc of the civil rights movement and evaluating how his presidency meets the ideals of the civil rights era. By necessity, these are comparisons and analyses that must come at the end of the Obama Presidency, not it’s beginning. <\/p>\n And yet, it is also true that the symbolism matters. A fantastic retrospective biography of Obama in the Washington Post<\/a> draws the timeline explicitly – Obama was literally born at the same time as the civil rights movement itself:<\/p>\n He was born on Aug. 4, 1961. On that day in Alabama and Mississippi, And in Shreveport, La., on Aug. 4, 1964, This historical context gives us a sense of just how much distance has been covered from a civil rights perspective – how short a time ago, was America the home of the brave indeed<\/a> but not<\/i> the land of the free, and still failing to live up to the promise of its founding! <\/p>\n It is fitting that Obama invoke the Founders, then, tomorrow. What MLK Jr. did was to remind America of the promise of its origins, not define some new level of liberty for America to reach beyond. It is the Founding vision of America that Obama represents, and the Reverend was a moral guide along that journey to full fruition. Obama himself does not represent the end of that journey, but rather the beginning. We have only truly arrived now. This is the new Freedom Ride.<\/p>\n related: My previous post on the Freedom Riders<\/a>. Also a must-read is the full text of Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Barack Obama strove to avoid race as a defining issue for his campaign. Part of this was pragmatic; running as an explicitly “Black” candidate would have hurt his electability beyond the racial silo, not because of racism per se but rather because tying yourself to any one identity too strongly by necessity pushes other identities…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":165,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[29,194,198,26,126],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-purple-politics","tag-barack-obama","tag-inauguration","tag-mlk","tag-politics","tag-racism"],"yoast_head":"\n
\ncommander-in-chief will be a central storyline for the media and for
\nmany in the jubilant crowd — but it is not the tale Team Obama is
\ntrying to tell.
…
There’s a natural temptation to situate Obama’s inauguration in the arc
\nof the civil rights movement. A huge sign in a Georgetown shop window
\nrecounts a saying that circulated during the campaign: “Rosa sat so
\nMartin could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run; Obama is running
\nso our children can fly!”<\/p>\n
\nwhere King gave his “I Have a Dream Speech,” and the fact that the King
\nholiday comes a day before the inauguration – Obama’s Inauguration
\ncelebrations will do little to promote him as the carrier of that torch.<\/p>\n
\nabout them,” says Douglass. “This is not a celebration of an election —
\nit is a celebration of our common values.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
\nan early voting rights battle was waged, with lawsuits filed in three
\ncounties where voting officials imposed prohibitively rigid standards
\non black applicants. In one Mississippi county, there were 2,490 blacks
\n\u00bf and none was registered to vote. In New Orleans that day, a federal
\nappeals court ruled on the expulsion of six black students from Alabama
\nState College who staged a sit-in at the Montgomery County Courthouse
\nlunch grill, where African Americans could not eat. In Washington, five
\nblacks who had been arrested by security police for trying to integrate
\nthe Glen Echo Amusement Park in the Maryland suburbs were asking the
\nU.S. Supreme Court to review the case.<\/p>\n
\nthe day Obama was born, a squadron of policemen assembled in the
\nContinental Trailways bus depot to uphold local and state laws
\nprohibiting black people from stepping foot in a waiting room reserved
\nfor whites. Across the Deep South that summer, black and white Freedom
\nRiders had encountered violence and arrests as they challenged Jim Crow
\nlaws by trying to integrate buses and bus stations. At 5:20 that August
\nmorning, four African Americans arrived at the Trailways depot with
\ntickets to take the 5:45 from Shreveport to Jackson, Miss., the hub of
\nprotests where hundreds of Freedom Riders had been arrested in previous
\nmonths. When the four attempted to enter the white waiting room, they
\nwere met by the Shreveport police chief and 40 officers. The riders
\nrefused orders to leave and were arrested for disturbing the peace,
\nalong with two compatriots who had driven them to the bus station and
\nwere accused of “counseling and encouraging” them.<\/p>\n
\nthe day Obama turned 3, was one of the seminal tragic dates in civil
\nrights history. It was on that day that FBI agents in Mississippi, at
\nthe end of a two month search, discovered the bodies of Michael
\nSchwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney after bulldozing a partly
\nconstructed earthen dam in the woods outside the town of Philadelphia.
\nThe three men \u00bf Goodman and Schwerner white, Chaney black, all
\nvoting-rights organizers during what was known as Freedom Summer \u00bf had
\nbeen murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan with the implicit
\nacquiescence of racist local authorities.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n