King and his presidents
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THIS is a week to think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the presidency. Barack Obama and King are quite different personalities, united chiefly by racial background and rhetorical ability. But there is a connection between them, and it traces back to how the turmoil of the 1960s shaped the policies of presidents.
It would have been inconceivable in 1960 that a Negro (the preferred word then) would have been considered for the presidency, even if his mother were white and his father a Kenyan - not an American descended from slaves. Indeed, most whites at the time opposed interracial marriage, and it was illegal throughout the South. King led the movement that forced Americans to confront the hypocrisy of their past and at least pay lip service to the notion that all people deserve equal opportunity.
In doing so, he created an opening not just for laws that secured African-Americans' right to vote, but also for a more inclusive politics. Obama is ascending to the presidency not least because of King's efforts to sway previous occupants of the office.
King and his more militant allies seized control of the issue in 1963. Their protests against segregation in Birmingham, Ala., and the march in Washington moved President Kennedy to propose the bill that became the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations.
Lyndon Johnson pushed that bill through Congress after Kennedy's assassination. Johnson, a fervent supporter of civil rights, formed an informal alliance with King on their next great cause. "We're not on our knees begging for the ballot. We are demanding the ballot," King proclaimed in 1965 as he launched a campaign to break the discriminatory policies that kept blacks from voting in Alabama. The Voting Rights Act sped through Congress, and for the first time since Reconstruction, blacks were able to register and vote throughout the South.
King told Johnson that, "It is so important to get Negroes registered to vote in large numbers. It would be this coalition of the Negro vote and the moderate white vote that would really make the new South." The President agreed with King then, but earlier he more frankly acknowledged to an aide: "I think we've just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come."
King moved on to Chicago, where he failed to break the discriminatory housing policy sanctioned by then-Mayor Richard Daley. Johnson was no help here.
King was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968. Obama was 6 years old.
In 1985, Obama moved to Chicago to become a community organizer, his first full-time job after college. In his book "Dreams from My Father," he recalls that photos of Harold Washington, the newly elected mayor and a black man, were proudly displayed in barbershops, cobbler shops, and beauty parlors. "Before Harold, seemed like we'd always be second-class citizens," a barber said as he cut the young Obama's hair.
Obama also observed the poverty endemic in the black community, with its accompanying violence and despair. But he thought enough of the city to return after law school, start a family, enter politics, win a state Senate seat in a racially mixed district, and persuade a predominantly white electorate to select him for the US Senate. And in winning the presidency last year, he gained the electoral votes of three former Confederate states - North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida. In doing so, he made a reality of what King had envisioned in the 1960s: a successful black-white political coalition.
Much remains to be done to achieve racial justice, but on the eve of the Obama inauguration, progress needs to be acknowledged as well. As Obama said at the groundbreaking for the King memorial in Washington in 2006, "By dint of vision and determination, and most of all faith in the redeeming power of love . . . he finally inspired a nation to transform itself, and begin to live up to the meaning of its creed."
