Charles P. Henry - The Obama Phenomenon: Toward a Multiracial Democracy

The Obama Phenomenon

The Obama Phenomenon

Toward a Multiracial Democracy

Edited by

CHARLES P. HENRY, ROBERT L. ALLEN, AND ROBERT CHRISMAN

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

2011 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress

Contents

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank Loretta Henry and Maize Woodford and Alexandra Jennings of The Black Scholar staff for their invaluable assistance on this project.

We also gratefully acknowledge the professional support of Joan Catapano and the University of Illinois Press.

The Obama Phenomenon

Introduction

CHARLES P. HENRY

Times are out of joint. We have an African American president yet representatives call him a liar publicly and the Republicans hold an alternate State of the Union in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Philadelphia, Mississippi, has a Black mayor yet Blacks and Whites find it hard to find a justice of the peace that will marry them in Louisiana, which has an East Indian American as governor. Chris Matthews forgets the president is Black but Harry Reid is able to distinguish him from darker, less-well-spoken African Americans. It seems some have transcended race but others have not.

I was only three years old when Ralph Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize. Therefore I dont remember the extent to which the national and even world communities of African descent celebrated. I believe it must have been some collective party. After all, he beat out Winston Churchill, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Harry Trumanwho called him with congratulations. The award came at the beginning of a series of postWorld War II events signaling a period of racial advancement including the desegregation of baseball and the military. Again I was only eight when the Supreme Courts Brown decision was announced. As the only Black student in my elementary school this probably should have registered with me, but it didnt. However, I know it was a cause of national celebration among African Americans, or, as we were labeled then, Negroes. I know it inspired Martin Luther King and Ralph Bunche to predict that within ten years America would be fully integrated.

The old folks had a word that described such eventsa jubilation. Undoubtedly no event before or since matched the jubilation marking the Emancipation Proclamation. For many years into the twentieth century Blacks would celebrate this day of jubilation. The Black Republican president, Lincoln (Clinton was not the first Black president), had come through, and even though the scope of the Proclamation was limited, it signaled the end of enslavement. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson was on the scene in Port Royal, South Carolina, the morning of January 1, 1863:

About ten people began collecting, steamboats from up & down river [and] from that time forth the road was crowded with riders & walkerschiefly black women with gay handkerchiefs on their heads & a sprinkling of men. Many white persons also, superintendents and teachers. As everyone gathered in a large clearing, a military band played in the background and local dignitaries mounted a platform set beneath towering live oak trees, where they had a clear view of the river. Like many observers, the sight of the black soldiers of the First South Carolina Volunteers especially impressed African American missionary Charlotte Forten

Ceremonies opened with prayer and a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, followed by a presentation of colors to the First South Carolina Volunteers. Rev. Mansfield French delivered to Colonel Higginson a silk flag bearing the name of the regiment and the proud proclamation, The Year of Jubilee has come! As Higginson waved the flag, African American women and men in the audience broke in with the national anthem. The freed peoples burst of patriotism was utterly unexpected and moved many to tears. Higginson recalled, I never saw anything so electric; it made all other words cheap; it seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed. Humbled, he wondered how he could follow with his speech: Just think of it; the first day they had ever had a country, the first flag they had ever seen which promised anything to their people.

Albert Brooks, an ex-slave interviewed by the Works Progress Administration in 1938, reported on the massive parade he attended as a young child. He said one teacher was so intoxicated with joy that she stood on the church steps and just shouted unashamed before all the people that were present. His own stepfather climbed to the top of the church shouldering a massive American flag that he struggled to wave overhead. Looking back, Brooks said, Since that first celebration I have attended many others but Ill never forget the first Emancipation Proclamation celebration.

Ironically, January 1st had widely been known as Heartbreak Day among many antebellum African Americans. It was traditionally a day of large slave auctions and witnessed the breakup of many families. Prior to the Emancipation Proclamation Blacks had often celebrated Independence Day on July 5th in protest of the failure of the Declaration of Independence to include them. Frederick Douglasss great Fourth of July oration, What Country Have I, reflects the opposite of the patriotism felt on Emancipation Day. Even the formal end of the slave trade in 1808 was an occasion for celebration across the Black Nation.

Once again I was around and even more aware of my history by the time of the March on Washingtonthe symbolic high point of the civil rights movement. I remember coming home in the late afternoon to find my father uncharacteristically sitting in front of the television. On the screen flashed more Blacks than I had ever seen before, along with Whites, milling at the marble feet of Lincoln. Since this was the first live television coverage of a civil rights march, I, like many others, was struck by the world-weary prophetic voice of Martin Luther King Jr. Yet, like many teenagers, especially in the North, the words had little conscious impact. I had been more impressed with the courage of the students closer to my own age that were sitting in and freedom riding all across the South.

By the time of Jesse Jacksons 1984 speech before the Democratic national convention, I was in the audience and fully aware of the implications of Jacksons challenge to the Democratic establishment. There was much weeping and a sense of pride but no jubilationafter all Jackson had lost the nomination.

It was in Denver in 2008 that I got a sense of the jubilation experienced by my ancestors. Walking into the stadium with a long line of Obama supporters, I met a Black woman in her eighties, dressed head to toe in hot pink and high heels, who said she had to be there. She rejected any offers to carry her bags and said she had driven from Southern California by herself to witness Obamas nomination.

And what must have been going through John Lewiss mind as he strode out to the podium before some eighty-four thousand people forty-five years to the day after he addressed the March on Washington? When he spoke at the feet of the Lincoln Memorial that day in 1963, he was the young radical whose remarks had to be edited at the insistence of Archbishop Patrick OBoyle, Walter Reuther, Burke Marshall, and others. It was the second most famous speech or nonspeech of the March on Washington. He and his band of civil rights activists (community organizers) in SNCC wanted to attack the Kennedy administration for its failure to protect Blacks seeking to exercise their civil rights in the South. In the name of unity, his elders encouraged him to drop his most charged statements. He had wanted to personalize his speech by naming names and pointing out that at that very moment nine civil rights leaders were being indicted in Albany, Georgia, for peaceful protest, not by the Dixiecrats but by the Kennedy administration. Lewis wanted to conclude his speech with the line, We shall crack the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy.