It’s hard to pinpoint the time of death of the idea that a Black candidate couldn’t win the race for the Presidency of the United States in 2008. Was it when Barack Obama gave his victory speech after winning the Iowa caucus on January 3, 2008, sparking his supporters to chant "Race Doesn’t Matter?" Was it when he gave his speech on race in Philadelphia, moving millions of Americans with his frank and substantive analysis of the costs on American society of lingering racial animosities—and in the process neutralizing the most damaging attack on his electability? Or was it a long and incremental process over decades that just happened to culminate in the timely arrival of a candidate with Barack Obama’s exceptional skills?
As a 45-year old White/Hispanic male that spent many formative years in the South, studied African-American history, and lived through a transformation of race relations in fits and starts, it’s a profound question that I’ve been thinking about for several months.
When I was born in 1962, less than a year after Barack Obama, African-Americans in northern cities were still not able to try on clothing in downtown department stores. In the South, Blacks were still drinking from separate water fountains; they were disenfranchised by poll taxes and literacy tests; Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington (actually proposed by A. Phillip Randolph in the 1940s, but delayed for decades) had yet to happen; and African-Americans were unable to travel freely and without fear of violence and intimidation.
Just three months after my birth, the University of Mississippi had riots when an African-American military veteran named James Meridith tried to enroll. A year later, George Wallace blocked the entrance of the University of Alabama. In 1966, the Southeastern Conference didn’t have a single African-American college basketball player—the first was Perry Wallace, now a Law Professor at American University. The last team in the SEC to add an African-American basketball player to their squad was Mississippi State in 1973—hardly ancient history.
As I’ve documented in previous diaries, I’ve been privileged to watch Barack Obama’s political ascendancy close-up, as I happened to arrive in Chicago just a couple of years after Obama. In 1983, only two years before I arrived in Chicago, Harold Washington was elected as the first Black mayor of Chicago in a racially-charged contest in which his White Republican opponent had the slogan, "Epton. Before it’s too late." Washington won in the heavily Democratic city with the support of progressives, but he had a hard time governing in his first term.
Harold Washington proved all of the nay-sayers wrong. He was a fiercely progressive yet very effective mayor in Chicago, and he demonstrated through action that he was a competent and visionary leader for citizens of all races. Unlike many other African-American mayors of his generation in other major cities, Washington was fair, effective, and equitable—almost to a fault. Washington’s enlightened tenure was the beginning of a Golden Age in Chicago, one that saw the city turn around population losses and move toward a post-racial politics.
Shortly after Washington won his mayoral campaign, Chicagoan Jesse Jackson made a historic run for President in 1984, and again in 1988. In 1990, L. Douglas Wilder won the Governorship of Virginia. Two years later, Chicagoan Carol Mosley Braun became the first African-American woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate, and only the second African-American U.S. Senator in the 20th Century.
In the meantime, several African-Americans rose to unprecedented positions of respect-- if not outright adoration-- on the national stage outside politics in the late 1980s and through the 1990s. Chicagoans Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan became icons idolized by millions of all races. Multi-racial Tiger Woods came out of Stanford University in the late 1990s and became one of the most celebrated and successful competitors what had long been a bastion of White exclusivity—golf. Golf!! Unimaginable!!
Waiting in the wings in 2004 was Barack Obama. Armed with an accomplished Ivy League education, years of working in the trenches as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, the experience of running unsuccessfully against Old School Congressman Bobby Rush, eight years in the Illinois legislature, and fresh off winning the Democratic primary for the Illinois U.S. Senate seat that Mosley Braun once held, Obama was chosen as the keynote speaker for the 2004 Democratic National Convention. And he knocked it out of the park, nearly taking the focus away from John Kerry by articulating a whole new ethos of American politics.
While people around the country who aren’t familiar with the Chicago experience might see Barack Obama’s rise as sudden and startling, a lot of us in Chicago see his success as based partially on the people that have come before him, and the unique experiences we’ve had with visionary, exceptional African-American leaders. To most of us here in Chicago and throughout Illinois, it’s absurd that there’s still a question about the efficacy of a brilliant, dynamic, visionary, thoughtful African-American politician on a national level.