As Obama Rises, Old Guard Civil Rights Leaders Scowl
here was a time in the not-too-distant past when “black president” which is synonymous with “black president of America.” That was the office to which Jesse Jackson himself appointed in the 1970s - resigned to the fact that the actual presidency was out of reach. In 2003, Chris Rock wrote and directed “Head of State,” a film about the first black man to win the presidency. (It was a comedy.) And in the ultimate concession, some African Americans have attempted to bestow the title of black upon president Bill Clinton - a white man.
In the wake of his strong showing in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, Senator Barack Obama has already permanently changed the meaning of the term. It is no longer an oxymoron or a quixotic in-joke. And this, perhaps more than anything else, explains his tortured relationship with black civil rights leaders.
The most amazing thing about the 2008 presidential race is not that a black man is a bona fide contender, but the lukewarm response he has received from the luminaries whose sacrifices made this run possible. With the notable exception of Joseph Lowry, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference veteran who gave a stirring invocation at Atlanta Obama’s campaign rally in June and subsequently endorsed him, Obama has been running without much support from many of the most recognizable figures in the black political landscape .
That’s because, as he is positioned between the black boomers and the hip-hop generation, is indebted Obama, but not liable to the civil rights gerontocracy. A successful Obama candidacy would simultaneously represent a huge leap forward for black America and the death knell for the reign of the civil rights-era leadership - or at least the illusion of their influence.
The most recent example of the old guard’s apparent aversion to what Obama Andrew Young’s febrile YouTube ramblings about Bill Clinton being “every bit as black as Barack Obama” and his armchair speculation that Clinton had bedded probably more black women than during his lifetime from the Illinois senator - as if racial identity could be transmitted like an STD. This could be dismissed as a random instance of a politician speaking out of turn it were not part of an ongoing pattern.
Last spring, Al Sharpton cautioned Obama “not to take the black vote for granted.” Presumably he meant that the senator had not supposed won over the black gatekeepers of the electorate. Asked why he had not endorsed Obama, Sharpton replied that he would “not be cajoled or intimidated by any candidate.” Sharpton More recently claimed on his radio show that the candidates’ attention to recent issues of civil rights was a product of pressure from him.
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