Obama calls it “an amazing journey”, but he would be the first to admit it began when he was only a toddler. His tear-jerkingly wonderful election to America’s top job was conceived almost half a century earlier when men who are now almost forgotten — Bob Moses, John Lewis, James Foreman, and Aaron Henry among dozens of others — started to press for African Americans to break through the barriers which blocked them from voting.
How things have changed since then, though I’m not sure whether the process has been fast or slow. A bit of both, I suppose. For myself I couldn’t help but feel a lump in the throat when Mississippi was chosen for the first Obama-v-McCain debate. When I first traveled to the state 45 years ago this month, Mississippi was America’s heart of darkness, the most vicious, brutal, and cruel place in the Union. It had a higher percentage of blacks than any other state but only 6 percent had been allowed to register to vote. The majority lived as share-croppers in pathetic wooden shacks on the edge of cotton fields. Lynchings were still going on, though usually via the barrel of a gun rather than the noose of a rope. It was the Third World in the First World, and most Americans didn’t care.
A few black heroes were not willing to tolerate it any longer. When they asked white students to visit Mississippi in November 1963 to share and publicize the beatings and arrests that were the daily fare of black activists, we piled into a car and drove for 24 hours from Yale. The state was choosing a new governor and in Biloxi we cowered behind pillars in the aisle as rocks were thrown through a black church’s glass front-doors by a redneck crowd, bringing an election rally to an abrupt and bloody close. In Hattiesburg we watched in shock as beefy white fire marshals stormed into another meeting and ordered everyone out, claiming the overflow crowd created a safety hazard.
But momentum was on our side. Next summer the influx of northern students had grown from a trickle to a small stream. Around 800 showed up for the Mississippi Summer Project, three months of effort to get blacks on to the voter rolls. The federal government was slowly cranking into motion too, motivated in no small part by the international shame of being responsible for an area of America which resembled apartheid South Africa. In spite of the elite attention fear in many black communities remained overwhelming. It was going to take more than a few months of protest by black and white outsiders to change things enough for black Mississippians to feel confident. We constantly reminded ourselves: “We will leave but they have to live here and face the consequences.” In July on the day after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act which outlawed segregation in restaurants, cafes, buses, and other public facilities I visited a tiny white-washed wooden church in the Mississippi Delta to gauge the reaction. An old-style pastor virtually dismissed the historic act as irrelevant. “They can pass Civil Rights Acts from now until kingdom come, but our faith in the Lord is the same,” he told his fan-waving congregation on a blistering hot day. Perhaps it was his way of avoiding the challenge of sitting down at a drug-store lunch-counter and testing whether he would be served or beaten. To him Washington was a long, long way away.
That autumn I drove black people to the polls in New Haven, Connecticut to vote for Lyndon Johnson, the president who had pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress. Northern blacks faced no external obstacles. Their inhibition was psychological. Was there any sense in which my vote will make a difference? In November 1964 it seemed it might, since the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, was so far to the right. A few months later LBJ sent US troops to Vietnam.
We learned a harsh lesson in disappointment.
But LBJ was still pushing for reform within America, so we did not give up. By then the focus for the voting drive had switched from Mississippi to Alabama, thanks largely to the self-promoting racism of its flamboyant governor, George Wallace. Martin Luther King had taken up the voting issue after his triumph in getting public places integrated. In March 1965 we crammed into a Baptist church in the black section of Selma to listen to King. Fired up by his words of courage and indignation, we spilled into the street and marched off toward Montgomery, Alabama’s state capital. Barely 500 yards away on the far side of a bridge a phalanx of muscle-rippling state troopers with billy clubs and teargas blocked our path and turned us back. Defeat soon turned into victory. A court ordered Wallace to desist and a few weeks later black and white marchers were able to go all the way to Montgomery. Congress was shamed again. That summer it passed the Voting Rights Act. In no Deep Southern state, not even Mississippi, did blacks amount to a majority, so we didn’t expect a rapid change. Giving them confidence was one thing. Giving them power was another. The first beneficiary, a decade later, was Jimmy Carter. Thousands of southern blacks had registered to vote. The sense of disgrace which still clung to America’s Deep South in the minds of other Americans had faded enough by 1976 for a liberal white Southerner to become an acceptable candidate, and even win.
This too was part of Obama’s “amazing journey”. There is a linear progression between Carter and Obama, even as they share another quality. Each man is by far and away the most intelligent and morally uncorrupted person to reach the White House in a generation. The final step — the election of a black American to the country’s top job — has taken 32 years more. No longer is a black candidate the champion of a minority. He has triumphed as the choice of a majority. In those far-off times in Mississippi in 1963 I never expected to see this day.
