Obama: History in the making, first black nominee

Images (showing 1 of 3 photos)

When this campaign ends, after future presidents have come and gone, and when today's young people are grown old, history will remember Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2008, as the day a black man became the presidential nominee of a major party.

This is history with the ink still wet; transcendent, yet in your face now.

It's a history that belongs to the red states and the blue states and the United States, to borrow the phrase that made people first sit up and listen to Barack Obama only four years ago.

Americans who don't like him, who will never vote for him, own it, too.

The roll call of states Wednesday night at the Democratic convention means Denver joins Springfield, Ill., and Washington, D.C. in an arc that spans centuries which saw slavery, emancipation, lynchings, Jim Crow, lunch counter bigotry, voting rights, integration, oratory, intermarriage, black pride, assassination, riots, marches — so many marches — and now a nomination.

The arc traces Abraham Lincoln's legacy of freeing the slaves to Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech at the Lincoln Memorial 45 years ago Thursday, to the convention center in Denver.

And on next to Invesco Field, where Obama will speak on the anniversary of King's "I have a dream" speech.

"This is a monumental moment in our nation's history," Martin Luther King III, the civil rights icon's oldest son, told AP on Wednesday. "And it becomes obviously an even greater moment in November if he's elected."

Democrats have danced around race for much of their convention, to a point where the marker that will enter the history books is almost obscured. It's all about making whites comfortable voting for him. Democrats worry about a backlash.

Obama's racial milestone was on everyone's minds but few lips as speaker after speaker stood to emphasize that he is a regular guy.

Yet all knew, win or lose in the fall, something for the ages was unfolding. "This man is on a mission," said Florida delegate Cynthia Moore Chestnut of Gainesville.

That's a lot riding on someone who has fought no wars, led no mass protests, served two-thirds of a term in the Senate, and missed the height of the civil rights movement because he was too young.

Until now, Obama's promise has outpaced his achievements and, at times, he has sounded like a man carried along on a wave that came out of the blue.

"When I actually do something," he joked not so long ago, "we'll let you know."

Two movements — for blacks and women — converged in this campaign as Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton went head to head. Both movements got farther than ever before, but only one could carry the day.

The roll call ended her historic campaign to become the first female nominee of a major party and hard feelings linger.

Civil rights and women's rights are not in a horse race. But over two centuries it has felt like one, as if there were only so much equality to go around at any given moment.

Women and blacks have worked together at times, apart at other times and against each other on occasion, as their advancements leapfrogged.

Blacks got the right to vote, then women did. But then blacks wrestled for decades to secure the right to vote without impediments that amounted to disenfranchisement.

Paradoxically (does history ever unfold in a neat progression?), Obama is less a product of the civil rights movement than most of his black country men and women. He is not a descendent of slaves. He is the son of a black man from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas.

Obama inevitably stands on many shoulders as beneficiary of the evolution of black political power in the United States.

There are the shoulders of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, whose many accomplishments include this milestone: At the Republican convention in 1888, he received one vote in the presidential roll call, the first black man to get a vote for a major party nomination.

There are the shoulders of Jesse Jackson, a century later the first black contender to sway the race for president.

And the shoulders of ordinary voters across racial lines, like Kate Clark, 53, a white cafe owner in Nazareth, Pa., who said: "I think we need to see the United States and see the world through eyes that are younger, through eyes that have dreams, through eyes that see something new for the nation."

And Edwin David, who served with the famed World War II unit of black fighters known as the Tuskegee Airmen and, at age 83, and retired in the Pocono Mountains, pleaded: "Just let me live 'til voting time in November. In my lifetime, we just might get to see the first African-American president."

Back To Top