Martin
Luther King, Barack Obama,
Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Importance of Being in the Right Place at the
Right Time
Now that
Barack Obama is president,
there are little placards around saying: “Rosa sat so Martin could walk so Barack could run so our children can fly.” This reference to Rosa Parks’ refusal to give
up her seat on a bus, to Martin Luther Kings organizing marches for equality to
Barack Obama’s campaign for
the presidency is correct and appropriate, but it is not complete.
Rosa
Parks had been a long time activist with the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, the organization that spearheaded the civil
rights movement before Dr. King established the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference. What made Rosa Parks’
rebellion possible was the beginning of the proliferation of private
automobiles, even for blacks. Black
people could successfully protest the inequitable treatment on buses because
buses were becoming less and less necessary.
Martin Luther King was
born in 1930. He was 15 when World War
II ended. So, he was able to take
advantage of the progress blacks could make as a result of World War II,
without having endured the trauma of combat or service in the military. He was able to take advantage of the
educational benefits of desegregation by attending Boston University. He chose the one field where black people
could rise to the top, as a minister.
Barack Obama was born in 1961, in Hawaii. He grew up in Kansas and Indonesia. More significantly, even though Obama is black, his black ancestors did not come to the
United States by forced slavery. His
father came to America for the same reasons most white Americans’ ancestors
came, for greater opportunity and the promise of a better life. More significantly, however, the major
struggles of the civil rights era and the passage of the voting rights and
public accommodations bills were history when Obama
was still a boy. As a man, he has been
able to take advantage of the fruits of that struggle, an Ivy League college
and Law School education, without, like Martin Luther King, having to have done
anything to win those opportunities for blacks.
The need to emancipate blacks
was not just a moral issue. People had
been against discrimination against black people since slavery started, but
they always failed to prevail. What
changed? One thing that changed was the
Cold War with the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II. The United States and the Soviets were
competing for the allegiance of the new nations in Africa and Asia that were
emerging from the collapse of the colonial empires in the wake of World War II.
In 1957, Ghana was the
first African nation since World War II to win its independence from Britain. On October 10, 1957 Komla
Agbeli Gbedemah, Ghana’s
Finance Minister, stopped for a meal at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Dover,
Delaware and was refused service. It
caused an international incident for which President Dwight Eisenhower had to
apologize. The message was clear. If the United States was to prevail in its
competition with the communists for the allegiance of Africa’s newly emerging
nations (and, incidentally, the huge deposits of uranium, the raw material of
atomic bombs, on that continent) it better get serious about treating black
people with respect.
The year 1957 saw the passage of the
first civil rights bill since reconstruction, engineered by Senate Majority
Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson. Then, once
Johnson became president after the assassination of John Kennedy, and
demolished conservative Barry Goldwater in the 1964 landslide that gave the
Democrats lopsided majorities in both houses of congress, he passed the Voting
Rights Act and the Public Accommodations Act which gave blacks the tools to
liberate themselves.
If that was all Johnson
did, Obama still would have lost the 2008
presidential election. Johnson also
passed a landmark immigration law that turned the United States from a
Eurocentric to a truly global nation. Obama won only 43% of the white vote, but he carried the
black vote, the asian vote
and the Hispanic vote by lopsided margins.
It was Lyndon Johnson’s immigration bill that changed the complexion of
the American electorate even more than the civil rights bills.
Even though slavery was
always wrong, even though segregation was always wrong, it took the correct
circumstances in addition to hard work and incredible bravery to defeat the
evil of racial discrimination. This is
what Menachem Begin was referring to when he said
that, “Anyone who doesn’t believe in miracles isn’t a realist.” The election of Barack
Obama as president of the United States fifty-one
years after the Finance Minister of Ghana could not drink a glass of orange
juice sitting at a table in a restaurant Dover, Delaware shows that sometimes
things change slowly and sometimes they change all at once. This is the meaning of living in a digital
age. A lot of people never thought they
would live to see a black person as president of the United States.
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