![]() Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates called Obama’s election “a magical transformative moment. Obama had won nearly 43 percent of white votes and overwhelming majorities of African Americans and Latinos. Rather than spotlighting ongoing discrimination, Obama celebrated “the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same flag.” Obama called for unity: “I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together-unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories but common hopes that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place but we all want to move in the same direction.” The emphasis on unity remained consistent throughout Obama’s campaign, in his First Inaugural Address, and in the first years of his presidency.Įven if Obama mostly avoided racial controversy, the racial symbolism of his election and inauguration was lost on no one. Obama called for “a more perfect union,” echoing Abraham Lincoln’s soaring rhetoric. In his speech, “A More Perfect Union,” Obama distanced himself from Wright but also took the occasion to offer a history lesson on race and civil rights in the United States. ![]() On March 18, 2008, Obama delivered perhaps the most famous address of his entire career, in response to the release of excerpts from controversial sermons by his Chicago minister, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. Still, as an African American candidate, the question of race was unavoidable for Obama. Obama eschewed the fiery rhetoric of civil rights–era and black-power activists who challenged discrimination and celebrated black pride instead he drew lessons from centrist black politicians like former Massachusetts senator Edward Brooke, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, and Virginia governor Douglas Wilder, all of whom won elections in majority white jurisdictions by downplaying race. He did not run as a “civil rights” candidate, and he generally distanced himself from what were perceived as “black issues” on the campaign trail. Delivering the convocation was the Reverend Joseph Lowery, a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and organizer of the 1965 march to Selma, Alabama, to demand voting rights.Īlthough Barack Obama was the first African American to be nominated for the presidency on a major party ticket, he had generally shied away from racial controversy as he moved onto the national political scene. Sitting nearby was John Lewis, a Georgia congressman and a former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who had been arrested during the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville and the 1961 Freedom Rides. ![]() The dignitaries on the platform included ninety-six-year-old Dorothy Height, who began her career as a civil rights activist in Harlem during the Great Depression and who helped organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The inaugural committee set aside seats for a few hundred surviving Tuskegee Airmen, members of a celebrated all-black unit during World War II. Many heroes of the black freedom struggle enjoyed places of honor. A New York Times headline in January 2009 captured the essence of Barack Obama’s inauguration for many Americans: “A Civil Rights Victory Party on the Mall.” An estimated 1.8 million people gathered to celebrate. ![]()
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