History > 2008 > USA > African-Americans (I)

Residents of Lima, Ohio,

posted a sign at the house where Ms. Wilson, 26,

was killed and her 14-month-old son was injured.

Illustration: J. D. Pooley

for The New York Times

Police Shooting of Mother and Infant

Exposes a City’s Racial Tension

NYT

30.1.2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/us/30lima.html

Black Americans see Obama

rise in context of history

Thu Feb 28, 2008
9:30am EST
Reuters
By Matthew Bigg

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Barack Obama has not asked black voters to back him solely because he could become the first black president in U.S. history, but for many African Americans the prospect remains tantalizing.

Many see his campaign for the Democratic nomination in terms of racial progress and in the context of a long struggle for political participation.

In interviews, people said Obama's ability to win primary and caucus races in predominantly white states also challenged a deep pessimism about the electoral prospects for an African American. Obama had a Kenyan father and white American mother.

"There is a population of African Americans, specifically the masses of African Americans ... who see Barack Obama as the culmination of the civil rights movements and other movements against racial inequality," said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, professor of politics at Princeton University in New Jersey.

"No one thought this would happen in our lifetime, or even in the lifetime of our children," Harris-Lacewell said.

Blacks overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates and big majorities have supported Obama over his rival Sen. Hillary Clinton who, along with her husband former President Bill Clinton, forged close ties with black voters.

Clinton has campaigned extensively for black votes but has seen her support erode despite the backing of influential politicians including the top tax writer in the House of Representatives, Rep. Charles Rangel of New York.

The senior black representative in Congress, Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, is staying neutral in the race but in a sign of eroding support prominent Congressman John Lewis switched his endorsement on Wednesday from Clinton to Obama.

"The people are pressing for a new day in American politics and I think they see Sen. Barack Obama as a symbol of that change," Lewis said.

COMPLEXITY BEHIND SUPPORT

Black support for Obama who is running to succeed President George W. Bush in elections in November is sometimes presented as a matter of simple racial pride.

The sentiment is expressed by the slogan seen on T-shirts: "He's black and I'm proud", a reference to a 1968 song by soul singer James Brown "Say it Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud". But some argue the reasons for it are complex.

A year ago, black voters were unsure about Obama, who was relatively unknown and had not risen through civil rights era of the 1960s that brought many blacks into national politics.

In February 2007 he lagged behind Clinton in polls of black voters, who make up about 10 percent of the U.S. electorate and are considered the most reliable Democratic block.

Only after a January 3 win in Iowa, where there are few black voters, did his popularity among South Carolina blacks soar, suggesting that Obama's appeal in part is based upon his ability to rally a diverse constituency.

"(Black) people want their vote to count. They may have thought that he was attractive as a candidate but they weren't going to vote for him if he had no chance," said William Jelani Cobb, a history professor at Spelman College in Atlanta.

"With Obama he is going for broke. That raised a higher bar for him getting support from black folk," Cobb said.

In a debate with Clinton on Tuesday the Illinois senator repeated a message central to his campaign, which he has used with largely black audiences: that he can help bring unity.

"I can bring this country together I think in a unique way, across divisions of race, religion, region. And that is what's going to be required in order for us to actually deliver on the issues that both Senator Clinton and I care so much about," he said.

The Democratic nominee will face the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

FEAR OF VIOLENCE

Even as Obama takes center stage in U.S. national politics, several voters expressed a fear they said was based upon history that suggests an African American risks having his ambition thwarted through violence.

The memory of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King 40 years ago is never far from their minds.

"This man's life they are going to snuff out before they let him sit in this seat (the White House)," said Shirley Hightower, a community activist at a housing project in Atlanta. "I like Obama but I am scared for him," she said.

At his request, the U.S. Secret Service began protecting Obama in May, the earliest that a presidential candidate has received protection -- 18 months before an election.

The U.S. Secret Service routinely provides security for the nominee from each political party, and as a former first lady, Clinton is protected.

(Editing by Jim Loney and Jackie Frank)

    Black Americans see Obama rise in context of history, R, 28.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN1361052220080228

FACTBOX:

Significant events

in black American history

Thu Feb 28, 2008
9:30am EST
Reuters

(Reuters) - Democratic Sen. Barack Obama is in a tight race with Sen. Hillary Clinton for the party's nomination to run against the presumptive Republican nominee John McCain in the November presidential election. Obama would be the first U.S. black president.

Following is a timeline of some of the significant events in black American history.

1619 - The first African slaves arrive in Virginia.

1787 - The U.S. Constitution states that Congress may not ban the slave trade until 1808.

1793 - The invention of the cotton gin increases demand for slave labor in the South. Fugitive Slave Act seeks to require free states to return fugitive slaves, but is rarely enforced in the North.

1808 - Importation of slaves banned.

1831-1861 - Around 75,000 slaves escape to the North and freedom using an "underground railroad".

1831 - Nat Turner leads a slave rebellion in Virginia.

1850 - Fugitive Slave Act revised to require law enforcement to return runaway slaves, forcing Northerners to choose between slavery and abolition.

1857 - U.S. Supreme Court decides the case of slave Dred Scott who sued for his freedom. Court said slaves were private property and no slave or descendant could be a U.S. citizen; Congress had no authority to outlaw slavery in federal territories.

1861 - The Confederacy is founded when the South secedes. The Civil War begins.

1863 - President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in Confederate states free.

1865 - The civil war ends. Lincoln is assassinated. The 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlaws slavery.

1868 - The 14th amendment grants full citizenship to all African-Americans.

1870. The right to vote is given to black males.

1896 - The Supreme Court holds that racial segregation is constitutional, paving the way for segregation in the South.

1948 - President Truman issues an executive order desegregating the U.S. armed forces.

1954 - A Supreme Court decision declares racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional.

1955 - Emmett Till, a black teenager, is murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

1955 - Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her arrest sparks a successful year-long boycott led by Martin Luther King to desegregate the city's buses.

1957 - The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights group, is founded.

1961 - Student and other volunteers known as "freedom riders" begin taking bus trips through the south despite violent opposition to test new laws that prohibit segregation.

1963 - King is jailed during civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama. Delivers "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington. Four black girls killed when bomb explodes at a Birmingham church.

1964 - President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act. Bodies of three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi are found. King wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

1965 - Civil rights leader Malcolm X is murdered. State troopers attack civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. Congress passes the Voting Rights Act.

1968 - Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

 Source: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmtimeline.html#AAH-1960

(Editing by Jim Loney and Jackie Frank)

    FACTBOX: Significant events in black American history, R, 28.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUKN2743706220080228

Record - High Ratio

of Americans in Prison

February 28, 2008
Filed at 11:12 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report tracking the surge in inmate population and urging states to rein in corrections costs with alternative sentencing programs.

The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.

Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 -- one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world.

The steadily growing inmate population ''is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime,'' said the report.

Susan Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States, said budget woes are prompting officials in many states to consider new, cost-saving corrections policies that might have been shunned in the recent past for fear of appearing soft in crime.

''We're seeing more and more states being creative because of tight budgets,'' she said in an interview. ''They want to be tough on crime, they want to be a law-and-order state -- but they also want to save money, and they want to be effective.''

The report cited Kansas and Texas as states which have acted decisively to slow the growth of their inmate population. Their actions include greater use of community supervision for low-risk offenders and employing sanctions other than reimprisonment for ex-offenders who commit technical violations of parole and probation rules.

''The new approach, born of bipartisan leadership, is allowing the two states to ensure they have enough prison beds for violent offenders while helping less dangerous lawbreakers become productive, taxpaying citizens,'' the report said.

According to the report, the inmate population increased last year in 36 states and the federal prison system.

The largest percentage increase -- 12 percent -- was in Kentucky, where Gov. Steve Beshear highlighted the cost of corrections in his budget speech last month. He noted that the state's crime rate had increased only about 3 percent in the past 30 years, while the state's inmate population has increased by 600 percent.

The Pew report was compiled by the Center on the State's Public Safety Performance Project, which is working directly with 13 states on developing programs to divert offenders from prison without jeopardizing public safety.

''For all the money spent on corrections today, there hasn't been a clear and convincing return for public safety,'' said the project's director, Adam Gelb. ''More and more states are beginning to rethink their reliance on prisons for lower-level offenders and finding strategies that are tough on crime without being so tough on taxpayers.''

The report said prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect a parallel increase in crime or in the nation's overall population. Instead, it said, more people are behind bars mainly because of tough sentencing measures, such as ''three-strikes'' laws, that result in longer prison stays.

''For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling,'' the report said. ''While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine.''

The nationwide figures, as of Jan. 1, include 1,596,127 people in state and federal prisons and 723,131 in local jails -- a total 2,319,258 out of almost 230 million American adults.

The report said the United States is the world's incarceration leader, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which make up the rest of the Top 10.

------

On the Net:

www.pewcenteronthestates.org .

    Record - High Ratio of Americans in Prison, NYT, 28.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Prison-Population.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Go Back to Black

February 27, 2008
The New York Times
By K. A. DILDAY

London

I’M black again. I was black in Mississippi in the 1970s but sometime in the 1980s I became African-American, with a brief pause at Afro-American. Someone, I think it was Jesse Jackson, in the days when he had that kind of clout, managed to convince America that I preferred being African-American. I don’t.

Now I live in Britain where I’m black again. Blacks in Britain come from all over, although many are from the former colonies. According to the last census, about half of the British people who identify as black say they are black Caribbean, about 40 percent consider themselves black African, and the rest just feel plain old black. Black Brits are further divided by ancestral country of origin, yet they are united under the term black British — often expanded to include British Asians from the Indian subcontinent.

The term African-American was contrived to give black Americans a sense of having a historical link to Africa, since one of slavery’s many unhappy legacies is that most black Americans don’t know particulars about their origins. Black Americans whose ancestors arrived after slavery and who can pinpoint their country of origin are excluded from the definition — which is why, early in his campaign, people said Barack Obama wasn’t really African-American. Yet, since he has one parent from the African continent and one from the American continent, he is explicitly African-American.

Distinguishing between American black people based on their ancestors’ arrival date ignores the continuum of experience that transcends borders and individual genealogies and unites black people all over the world. Yes, scientists have shown that black means nothing as a biological description, but it remains an important signal in social interaction. Everywhere I travel, from North Africa to Europe to Asia, dark-skinned people approach me and, usually gently but sometimes aggressively, establish a bond.

When, early on in the race for the Democratic nomination, people wondered if black Americans would vote for Mr. Obama, I never doubted. During the last two years I’ve learned to decipher his name in almost any pronunciation, because on finding out that I’m an American, all other black people I meet, whether they are Arabic-speaking Moroccans in Casablanca, French-speaking African mobile-phone-store clerks in the outer boroughs of Paris, or thickly accented Jamaican black Brits, ask me eagerly about him. Black people all over the world feel a sense of pride in his accomplishment.

It’s hard to understand why black Americans ever tried to use the term African-American to exclude people. The black American community’s social and political power derives from its inclusiveness. Everyone who identifies as black has traditionally been welcomed, no matter their skin color or date of arrival. In Britain, in contrast, dark-skinned people who trace their relatives to particular former colonies can be cliquish. Beyond the fact that blacks make up a smaller share of the population here, this regional identity may be a reason that the British black community isn’t as powerful a social and political force.

I’ve never minded not knowing who my ancestors are beyond a few generations. My partner is an Englishman whose family tree is the sort that professional genealogists post on the Internet because it can be traced back to the first king of England in the 11th century. To me, it’s more comforting to know that, through me, our children will be black, with all of the privileges and pains.

On Mr. Obama’s behalf, American blacks have set aside their exclusive label. Polls show that about 80 percent of blacks who have voted in the Democratic primaries have chosen him. And all of the black people in the mountains of Morocco, the poor suburbs of Paris, the little villages in Kenya and the streets of London are cheering Mr. Obama’s victories because they see him as one of their own.

Black Americans should honor that. It’s time to retire the term African-American and go back to black.

K. A. Dilday is a columnist for the online magazine Open Democracy.

    Go Back to Black, NYT, 27.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/opinion/27dilday.html?ref=opinion

Race Matters Less in Politics of South

February 21, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

CULLMAN, Ala. — The racial breakthroughs have come gingerly in Alabama over the years: a black mayor there, an old Klansman put on trial here, a civil rights memorial there.

And a few weeks ago, voters in a county that is more than 96 percent white chose a genial black man, James Fields, to represent them in the State House of Representatives. It is a historic first, but the moment is full of awkwardness.

“Really, I never realize he’s black,” said a white woman in a restaurant, smiling.

“He’s black?” asked Lou Bradford, a white Cullman police officer, jokingly.

“You know, I don’t even see him as black,” said another of Mr. Fields’s new white constituents, Perry Ray, the mayor of one of the county’s villages, Dodge City.

A woman congratulates Mr. Fields as he stops in traffic, and afterward, he shakes his head ruefully: “Sometimes, I have to pinch myself: ‘Am I really black?’ ”

Yet in a state once synonymous with racial strife, there is no denying this milestone, for all its tentativeness. Everyone — the voter in Cullman, the Alabama politician, the local historian — is rubbing his or her eyes, a little.

“It strikes me as a real watershed event,” said Samuel L. Webb, a historian at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Last fall, another black man, Eric Powell, was elected to the Mississippi State Senate from a district that is more than 92 percent white, and no one could find a modern precedent for that, either. Mr. Fields and Mr. Powell are Democrats who decisively beat white candidates in districts that traditionally support Republican presidential candidates.

Inevitably, there are questions about what this might mean for Senator Barack Obama’s candidacy in the Deep South, and the quick answer, perhaps, is not that much, at least in Cullman County at this moment. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton beat Mr. Obama here, by a margin of four to one, in the Democratic primary this month, as many here readily point out.

Yet there are parallels. The very quality that voters here highlight, in so many words, as one of Mr. Fields’s more attractive attributes — that they are at ease with him — is one of Mr. Obama’s most important selling points. The implications are not lost on State Senator Zeb Little, the majority leader in the Alabama Senate and a Democratic power broker in Cullman: black politicians can win in unlikely districts, transcending history and partisan politics, if voters can see them as one of their own.

“James is comfortable around white people, and white people are comfortable around James, and you see the same thing with Obama,” Mr. Little said. (He had asked Mr. Fields not to run, he recalls, because he did not think a black candidate could win.)

Granted, the peculiar local circumstances at play in these elections are not readily duplicated in a national election. Mr. Fields and Mr. Powell were enmeshed in their communities — hometown heroes, well before their elections. Mr. Powell, 41, was a football coach in the local schools in Corinth, Miss., and had played at the University of Mississippi; Mr. Fields, 53, is a former marine and part-time Methodist minister who worked in the unemployment office here for years, helping many find jobs. He served on the board of the local electrical cooperative, was active in the Boy Scouts and was a high school basketball star.

“He’s a dadgum good fellow,” said W. F. Davis, a retired boilermaker, at Jack’s, a roadside restaurant here, as Mr. Fields basked in congratulations nearby. “He’s always been one of us.”

The distinction between “one of us” and something else, of course, is always present in a county where Mr. Fields still sees Confederate flags dotting the landscape.

“There’s two different races, in that race,” explained James Rice, a white resident describing black people, as Mr. Fields affably worked voters at Jack’s. “You got some that don’t want to be nothing, and you got some that want to help. You don’t find too many like James Fields.”

Still, with many voters here, Mr. Fields has a personal bond dating to the days before new factories brought a measure of prosperity. Voters — rural white Alabama voters — smilingly approach the big, open-faced man; they hug him and joke with him.

“When their sons and daughters needed jobs, they said: ‘You go see James Fields. You go see that black man down there,’ ” Mr. Fields recalled. “When I returned from college, my whole life was centered around helping people. I was a public servant,” he says — a description readily echoed by many he encounters here.

For unsavory historical reasons, it could easily have turned out differently in a county that is almost entirely white. Mr. Fields inherited a bitter racial legacy, one he is conscious of though unsoured by. If you drove into Cullman 70-odd years ago, you might have happened on “a neatly-painted sign” by the roadside, as the New York writer Carl Carmer described it in his book, “Stars Fell on Alabama,” one bearing a chilling and crude inscription telling blacks: “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in this Town.”

It had always been a place of few blacks because there were few plantations, and the whites wanted to keep it that way. The sign has long since passed into half-remembered folk memory. But the sentiments behind it lingered; the Ku Klux Klan and Citizens Councils were strong in these hills, and blacks in Cullman were effectively confined to a forlorn hillside hamlet known as The Colony, which is where Mr. Fields grew up.

Still, the racial legacy is complicated, as it is everywhere in Alabama: Cullman was also the home base of Gov. James E. Folsom, whose moderation on race helped damage his career in the 1950s.

Matter-of-factly, Mr. Fields recounts an early history hemmed in at every turn by racism, at least until high school years.

In town, on Saturdays, “you didn’t try anything on.”

“You’d look at stuff,” he said. “We literally had nothing going to the cotton fields, picking cotton, beans.”

His father worked the night clean-up crew at a poultry-processing plant. And “beyond a shadow of a doubt,” he said, blacks knew they were unwelcome in the white, white town of Cullman.

When integration came to the schools in the mid-1960s, no one was eager to embrace the black students. “We were up for auction: who wants the colored people,” Mr. Fields said, recalling that only a school in another town would accept them. His parents made him travel a back road to avoid trouble; he vividly recalls driving up on a Klan rally as a young man.

But then, in high school, things changed. His athletic prowess earned him friendship among white peers; when rival football teams yelled racial epithets at him, his own classmates protectively retaliated.

All his life, Mr. Fields says calmly, he has had to deal with white people, in the fields, at school, and at work. Mr. Powell had a similar experience.

“I spent more time, as a kid, growing up with my white friends in their homes,” Mr. Powell said. In a county that is 98 percent white, “we were always around each other,” he said.

People in Cullman talk about Mr. Fields’s excellent connections in the state capital, Montgomery — he once served as assistant director of the Alabama Department of Industrial Relations — but they also speak, hesitantly, about sloughing off an age-old burden.

As Rob Werner, the owner of an outdoor-goods store here, put it: “People said, ‘Of course, James is black. This is great, this will get this off our back.’ ”

    Race Matters Less in Politics of South, NYT, 21.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/us/politics/21race.html

Lending laws unenforced

in housing crisis: Jackson

Wed Feb 20, 2008
5:37pm EST
Reuters
By Michele Gershberg

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. mortgage meltdown has its roots in lending discrimination against African-American and Hispanic communities and requires federal intervention to prevent it from crippling municipal services, civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson said on Wednesday.

Jackson told the Reuters Housing Summit in New York that nearly 40 percent of subprime loans went to black and Hispanic families, many of them in districts once shunned by discriminatory "redlining" lenders who later devised a way to profit there by selling a flawed financial product.

"They began to stereotype and target and cluster whole communities. It's kind of like reverse redlining," Jackson said.

Jackson estimates that nearly half of those borrowers could have been eligible for regular loan packages, but instead were locked into mortgages that threaten to balloon out of their ability to pay when the adjustable interest rates reset.

"It suggests that if fair lending laws had been enforced ... we would not have had this global economic crisis," Jackson said. "But while it started by unenforced civil rights laws, the bleeding has not stopped there. It's now engulfing the budgets of cities and counties and states."

Jackson also said that the U.S. Department of Justice was slow to respond, if at all, to concerns of lending discrimination.

An estimated 1.5 million subprime mortgages, traditionally targeted at borrowers with poor credit histories, will reset to higher interest rates this year, putting many owners at risk of losing their homes. Another 500,000 will reset in 2009, according to Federal Reserve estimates.

Jackson said the federal government should institute a halt to foreclosure proceedings and authorize the Federal Housing Administration or another body to start a major restructuring of subprime loans, with lower interest rates and payments spread out over a longer period.

He also called on state attorneys general to subpoena the major lenders on their loan practices and impose penalties on those who have violated the law.

He described President George W. Bush's plan to offer $152 billion in tax rebates this year to fend off a possible recession as irrelevant to the needs of home owners facing foreclosure and ignoring the cause of the crisis.

(Editing by Gary Hill)

    Lending laws unenforced in housing crisis: Jackson, R, 20.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/Housing08/idUSN2039245920080220

Bush calls

nooses and lynch threats

deeply offensive

Tue Feb 12, 2008
4:33pm EST
Reuters
By Jeremy Pelofsky

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush condemned as "deeply offensive" on Tuesday a spate of incidents involving the display of hangman's nooses, a potent symbol of racist lynchings and hatred of blacks in the United States.

Bush said there was still a long way to go for the country to unite on the issue of race.

"As a civil society, we must understand that noose displays and lynching jokes are deeply offensive," Bush said at a White House celebration of African-American history month. "They are wrong. And they have no place in America today."

Bush's remarks about race came as the U.S. capital and neighboring Virginia and Maryland held primary elections in which Democrats were deciding whether Sen. Barack Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president, or Sen. Hillary Clinton, who would be the first woman to hold the office, should be the party's nominee in the November election.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said there had been more than 70 reports of incidents involving nooses since December 2006.

One high-profile incident earlier that year focused nationwide attention on Jena, Louisiana, where three nooses were found hanging from a tree at a high school.

Six black students were later charged with assaulting a white student at the school, sparking civil rights leaders to lead national protest marches and offer support for those facing the criminal charges.

A noose was found on the door of a black professor at Columbia University in New York, and two were found on the campus of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.

The trend has even extended more recently into the golf world, when an anchor for the Golf Channel tried to joke that players bidding to challenge champion Tiger Woods, who is black, might have to "lynch him in a back alley." Shortly after that, Golfweek magazine fired an editor for depicting a noose on a cover last month for a story on the Woods incident.

Bush said some Americans fail to fully understand why the sight of a noose of a lynching remark sparks outrage.

"For generations of African-Americans, the noose was more than a tool of murder. It was a tool of intimidation that conveyed a sense of powerlessness to millions," he said.

(Reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky, editing by Patricia Zengerle)

    Bush calls nooses and lynch threats deeply offensive, NYT, 12.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1227217020080212

'At Canaan's Edge:

America in the King Years, 1965-68,'

By Taylor Branch

The Whirlwinds of Revolt

February 5, 2006
The New York Times
Review by ANTHONY LEWIS

We have had nothing like it in this country in living memory: a commanding moral voice, attached to no political party or public office, that moved governments and changed social institutions. That was Martin Luther King Jr.

He was despised by many. His ideas were sometimes rejected. He failed as well as succeeded. But he would not retreat from attacking what he came to believe were the three great afflictions of mankind: racism, war and poverty. In little more than a dozen years — from Dec. 5, 1955, when he set the Montgomery bus boycott on its way, to April 4, 1968, when he was murdered — he changed the face of America.

This is the last of three volumes in which Taylor Branch chronicles those years. It is a thrilling book, marvelous in both its breadth and its detail. There is drama in every paragraph. Every factual statement is backed up in 200 pages of endnotes.

"America in the King Years," Branch's running title for the trilogy, is not a mere conceit, a fancy way of describing a biography. It is not a biography of Dr. King. It is a picture of the country and the times as he intersected with them.

What a different country it was. I lived through those times, but "At Canaan's Edge" made me realize that I did not remember how different. It was before the revolution in women's roles, for example, as Branch tells us in a couple of quick sketches. Southerners had added a ban on sex discrimination to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a way to mock the bill, and at first it was widely treated as a joke. A Page 1 article in The New York Times in 1965 raised the question whether executives must let a "dizzy blonde" drive a tugboat or pitch for the Mets. In 1966 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission wondered, in a newsletter, whether an employer could be penalized for refusing to hire "a woman as a dog warden."

But of course it is the virulence of Southern racism at that time that is most striking. This was only 40 years ago, after the passage of the 1964 act, but racist violence and murder were still widespread in the Deep South. Everyone knew who the killers were, but juries would not convict — all-white juries. The openness of the violence was staggering. When Viola Liuzzo, a white woman, came down from Michigan to Selma, Ala., to help in the protest movement, a Ku Klux Klan gang pulled up alongside the car she was driving and shot her dead.

Branch has been working on these books for more than 20 years, exploring endless materials: newspapers, audiotapes, reports, books, personal memories. He has an incredible command of it all, bringing history to life with a few sentences here, extended chapters there on something like the march from Selma to Montgomery. I can pick out only a few themes to indicate the scope of his work.

Selma was about a basic right explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution, the right to vote without discrimination. In Alabama, Mississippi and large parts of other states in the Deep South, the right was a myth for blacks. They were threatened, abused, even murdered if they tried to register or vote; they often lost their homes or their jobs. Armed white mobs menaced them.

It was in the face of those tactics that King decided to lead a march from Selma to Montgomery as a protest for the vote. At the first attempt marchers were brutalized, the march turned back. But they persisted. Branch, usually given to understatement, lets himself go and speaks of "yearnings and exertions toward freedom seldom matched since Valley Forge."

Before a second attempt could be made to march to Montgomery, a difficulty intervened. Judge Frank M. Johnson enjoined the march because of likely violence. Johnson was a highly respected federal judge who had made many decisions in favor of civil rights. Justice Department officials pleaded with King not to violate the order lest he sacrifice the movement's reliance on law and the Constitution. But the protesters, many of them, did not want to give way. King did not say what he would do. The march began. He led it onto the Pettus Bridge at the edge of Selma, faced 500 state troopers — and suddenly turned and led the marchers back into Selma. He had made the point and desisted, obeying the law.

There followed a remarkable episode. Judge Johnson was now asked to let the march go forward and enjoin interference with it. But in a telephone conversation with the United States attorney general, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, he said he would not do so unless the federal government undertook to protect the marchers. And he wanted that assurance from the president, he said. Katzenbach gave him the assurance. Lyndon B. Johnson called the Alabama National Guard into federal service and sent regular Army detachments. On their third try, the marchers made it to Montgomery.

King believed that if Americans outside the South were aware of its brutal racism — as few then were — they would want to end it. The violent response to nonviolent protest made the brutality plain. What Americans read in newspapers and saw on television shocked them, and jump-started the political process. Meaningful civil rights legislation made it past Senate filibusters at last.

It was a crucial part of King's thinking to engage the president. As Robert Caro has demonstrated in his biography, Lyndon Johnson had shown streaks of racism in his life. But fundamentally he was for equal rights, and he seized the opportunity presented by the King campaign and the ugly Southern response. In a speech to the nation on March 15, 1965, he memorably adopted the words of the civil rights movement: "It's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And — we — shall — overcome."

L.B.J. is a second object of Branch's penetrating gaze in this volume: not just what he did on civil rights but his whole whirlwind of activity. Here he is on the telephone with Attorney General Katzenbach in Alabama, warning him not to smoke too much during late-night vigils. On one day in 1965 he takes a phone call from Drew Pearson, the columnist, and lectures him for 15 minutes about Vietnam. He receives the British foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, and a delegation, talking long past the scheduled time and telling them — to their confusion — "Sometimes I just get all hunkered up like a jackass in a hailstorm." He has a conference call with House leaders about the legislation to establish Medicare. He gets a telephone report from Selma.

FOR Johnson, race and Vietnam were preoccupations in tandem. In the same month as the march from Selma to Montgomery, March 1965, the first American combat units went ashore at Da Nang. King had had a good relationship with the president, but it broke down over the issue that Johnson rightly feared would overwhelm his reputation on social justice.

Branch's picture of Dr. King on Vietnam is of a man coming slowly, reluctantly, but irresistibly to embrace the issue — against the advice of many supporters. Finally, at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967, he called for the United States to "set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement."

The Riverside speech drew heavy criticism. John Roche, a Brandeis University professor who was then on the White House staff, said King had "thrown in with the Commies." He told the president that King was "inordinately ambitious and quite stupid (a bad combination)." A Washington Post editorial said, "Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence." But King did not give way. He told a church audience that the press had been "so noble in its praise" when he preached nonviolence toward white oppressors but inconsistently "will curse you and damn you when you say be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children."

Racism in America was not — and is not — confined to the South. Branch reminds us of that in small ways and large. In 1965, he notes, Mary Travers of the trio Peter, Paul and Mary kissed Harry Belafonte on the cheek at a rally. CBS television, which was showing the rally, was besieged by protesting callers, and took the rally off the air for 90 minutes. In the border state of Kentucky, the famous basketball coach Adolph Rupp kept his University of Kentucky team all white. He complained of calls from the university president, "That son of a bitch wants me to get some niggers in here." A little-noted team from Texas Western, with five black players starting, upset Kentucky in the 1966 championship game — a story told just now in the movie "Glory Road." Only slowly, after that, did the bar on black athletes break down in the South. Many people watching college sports on television today would not have dreamed that such a policy ever existed.

Chicago dramatized the reality of antiblack feelings in the North. Marches organized by King to protest segregated housing and unequal government benefits were met with mob taunts and rocks. "Burn them like Jews!" one white group shouted at the marchers. Branch concludes that "the violence against Northern demonstrations cracked a beguiling, cultivated conceit that bigotry was the province of backward Southerners."

The most chilling passages in this book, for me, are about J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director. His hatred of King was not a secret. But Branch shows how far it went — beyond extremity to morbid depravity.

Hoover instructed all in the bureau not to warn King of death threats. He told President Johnson that any requests for federal protection of King would come from subversives, and that King was "an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our Nation." He listed King as a prominent target in an order to all F.B.I. offices "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations." There was no basis in fact for the calumnies. The charge of subversion hung on the dubious thread of an allegation that Stanley Levison, an adviser to King, was a Communist agent — an allegation never shown to have any convincing support.

The low point in the Hoover story may have been his performance on the killing of Viola Liuzzo. He tried to conceal the fact that one of the Klansmen who shot at her was an F.B.I. informant, Gary Thomas Rowe — and lied to President Johnson about it. He urged the president not to speak with the Liuzzo family, telling Johnson that "the woman had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope; that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car; that it had the appearance of a necking party." (Liuzzo's arm was cut by a shard of glass from the shattered car window.) Branch calls Hoover's comments "slanderous Klan fantasy dressed as evidence."

J. Edgar Hoover was either a profoundly disturbed man by this time or that rarity, actual evil. The question that Branch leaves unaddressed is why President Johnson didn't fire him. The familiar explanation is fear of the poison that Hoover would spew out in response. But Lyndon Johnson could have handled that.

Under provocation that hardly any other human being could have resisted, King never gave up on nonviolence. The rise of black-power advocates like Stokely Carmichael did not move him. "I am not going to allow anybody to pull me so low as to use the very methods that perpetuated evil throughout our civilization," he told a meeting in 1966. "I'm sick and tired of violence. I'm tired of the war in Vietnam. I'm tired of war and conflict in the world. I'm tired of shooting. I'm tired of hatred. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of evil. I'm not going to use violence no matter who says it!"

One cannot read this amazing book without thinking about what King would be saying if he were with us today. He would surely be pointing to the vast racial injustice that remains in this country, and to the growing gap between rich and poor. I think there can be no doubt that he would also be speaking strongly against the war in Iraq, warning that it was killing Americans and Iraqis, nurturing terrorism, eroding the world's regard for America.

This third volume of Branch's trilogy deepens a feeling many have had about Dr. King, a mystery. He moved sometimes as if propelled by a force that others could not see. He rose to make a speech, and extemporaneous biblical eloquence would pour forth. His friends and supporters were often uncertain what he would do. But on the great issues he was right, and brave.

"To the end," Taylor Branch concludes, "he resisted incitements to violence, cynicism and tribal retreat. He grasped freedom seen and unseen, rooted in ecumenical faith, sustaining patriotism to brighten the heritage of his country for all people. These treasures abide with lasting promise from America in the King years."

Anthony Lewis is a former columnist for The Times.

    'At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68,' By Taylor Branch, NYT, 5.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/books/review/05lewis.html

The Long Run

Clinton’s

Gradual Education

on Issues of Race

February 2, 2008
The New York Times
By MARK LEIBOVICH

WASHINGTON — Growing up in the palest of Chicago suburbs, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had some of her earliest exposures to African-Americans through field trips. She sat in the back of her father’s Cadillac as he detoured through the inner city, cautioning her about the fate of people who, in his conservative Republican view, lacked the self-discipline to succeed.

She took a sociology course at Wellesley College that included a trip through Boston’s poor areas. On Tuesdays, she went to a housing project in Cambridge to mentor “underprivileged Negroes,” as she wrote to Don Jones, her minister back home, who had taken her to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Chicago four years earlier.

In a presidential campaign in which race has become a dominant issue, Mrs. Clinton’s early brush with Dr. King has been a recurring theme, invoked as a kind of “a-ha” episode to explain her coming of age on race. Yet Mrs. Clinton’s passage from sheltered Park Ridge, through the ferment of the civil rights era, to competing for black votes across the South, has been more gradual and introspective.

She spent 1964 volunteering for the Republican presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, a fervent opponent of the Civil Rights Act. She awakened politically in the combustible 1960s, but took a cooler approach to the civil rights movement. She demonstrated for racial equality, but it was just one of the items on her activism list (which included protesting the Vietnam War, agitating to allow cars on campus and fighting for the legal interests of children).

In promoting her civil rights record, Mrs. Clinton takes a sweeping view, incorporating a great deal of her work for the vulnerable and underserved — taking on juvenile-justice issues for the Children’s Defense Fund, leading a commission on education reform in Arkansas promoting the Family and Medical Leave Act as first lady. (Her campaign’s two-page list of civil rights accomplishments begins, at age 14, with the King field trip.)

“I do have a broader definition,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview. “Civil rights are what each of us as human beings are entitled to in relationship to our society. But it really is, at core, about the respect and dignity of each human being.”

Frayed Good Will

Mrs. Clinton has seen her support among blacks as central to her political identity. She has had many African-American friends and advisers, racially diverse staffs and a Senate voting record that has earned straight A’s from the N.A.A.C.P. Even her rival, Senator Barack Obama, said in a debate that he is “absolutely convinced” of Mrs. Clinton’s commitment to racial equality.

But that career’s worth of good will became somewhat frayed after supporters of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign — and chiefly, her husband — were accused of racially tinged attacks and innuendo against Mr. Obama before the South Carolina primary. Mr. Obama went on to rout Mrs. Clinton on the strength of strong support from blacks, a constituency Mrs. Clinton had courted hard.

The tone of the Clinton campaign deeply dismayed some African-Americans who had been close to the Clintons, including Eric Holder, a former top Justice Department official and Obama supporter. “It places their legacy at risk,” Mr. Holder said.

Even as the charged rhetoric of South Carolina subsides, race will no doubt persist as a theme for as long as Mr. Obama is running, the contest is close and emotions run raw. “I think everyone is trying to find their way, here,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Just as Mrs. Clinton has enjoyed the residual benefits of her husband’s popularity with blacks, she has also been tarred with the perceived failures of his administration. Any number of African-Americans, despite their support for Bill Clinton in the 1990s, still bristle over some episodes — from his criticism of the rapper Sister Souljah during the 1992 campaign to his welfare reform bill in 1996 to the number of black prisoners incarcerated during his administration.

“The policy record of the Clinton administration on civil rights is more mixed than people generally acknowledge,” said Christopher Edley Jr., the law school dean at the University of California, Berkeley, who served in the Clinton administration. He cited Mr. Clinton’s unwillingness to intervene in Rwanda, where hundreds of thousands died in tribal war, and his signing of what Mr. Edley called “a horribly punitive crime bill.” Mr. Edley said he remains fond of both Clintons but is supporting Mr. Obama.

Circumstances have put Mrs. Clinton in a delicate position: as the main obstacle to the first African-American with a serious shot of becoming president. “Hillary’s in a tough spot. We’re all in a tough spot,” said Representative James E. Clyburn, the Democratic House whip, and influential black leader from South Carolina. “You have two big dreams converging at the same time.”

While she has built her presidential campaign on “35 years of experience making change,” her first 25 years were arguably more central to shaping her views.

The city of Park Ridge, 15 miles northwest of Chicago, was mostly devoid of blacks, Hispanics and liberals — which was fine with Hugh Rodham, who was not shy about flinging prejudices across the dinner table. “He had the views that people of that age and time did,” Mrs. Clinton said.

She recalled her father’s driving her through rough parts of Chicago. “We’d go by skid row, which is what it was called in those days,” Mrs. Clinton said, “and we’d see some fellow leaning against a lamp post, and my father would start in on one of his usual lectures.”

Over time, she said, he mellowed. “His experience really undermined and contradicted” his earlier views on race, she said.

First Awareness

Mrs. Clinton recalled first being aware of racism a half-century ago, at age 10, when she saw the televised images of black students in Little Rock, Ark., being blocked from attending school by order of Gov. Orval E. Faubus.

"There were these pictures of these mobs, and these children trying to go to school, and it seemed so wrong,” she said in the interview, conducted by phone. “I used to go to Sunday school and sing ‘Jesus Loves the Children of the World,’ and I just couldn’t believe it.”

Her biggest early influence on race was Mr. Jones, who led the youth group at Park Ridge’s First United Methodist Church. He took the teens to meet with poor black children at a community center and chaperoned the expedition to see Dr. King, whose speech that Sunday night bemoaned the indifference of the privileged to the plight of the poor. The young Hillary Rodham was inspired to volunteer to baby-sit for the children of migrant farmers.

Still, she adopted her father’s staunch Republicanism, even working for Mr. Goldwater’s campaign. Today, she laughs off her “Goldwater Girl” period as a youthful indiscretion — and indeed, she was 16 at the time.

“One of the first things I knew about Hillary was that she was Republican and had been a Goldwater Girl,” said Janet McDonald Hill, a black Wellesley classmate. That biographical nugget comes up surprisingly frequently among Obama backers.

“Being a supporter of Barry Goldwater during the civil rights revolution is about as close to original sin as I can imagine,” said Mr. Edley, the Berkeley law school dean, who is African-American.

Mrs. Clinton made her first black friend in college: Karen Williamson, one of six African-Americans in her freshman class at Wellesley. They went to church together one Sunday, which upset Mrs. Clinton’s parents and led her to question her motives. “Look how liberal that girl is trying to be, going to church with a Negro,” Mrs. Clinton wrote to Mr. Jones, imagining her reaction if she had seen another white girl doing the same thing.

As a sophomore, Mrs. Clinton volunteered as a “Big Sister” to a 7-year-old black girl whose mother, a single housekeeper, needed child care. Mrs. Clinton helped the girl with homework, took her to movies, took her to dinner at Harvard.

Mrs. Clinton brooded over the nature of privilege, suffering and race. In a letter to a high-school friend, John Peavoy, she spoke of “the depression that descends on a person, especially one who has led a ‘sheltered suburban life,’ when he is confronted with the realities of city life.”

In the fall of 1966, she attended a “black power” meeting hosted by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee but disapproved of the group’s extreme “attitude toward civil disobedience,” as she wrote to Mr. Jones.

After Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, she attended a rally in Boston’s Post Office Square. Then the college government president, Mrs. Clinton discouraged a campus organization of black women from initiating a hunger strike to protest Wellesley’s sparse African-American enrollment and (non-existent) black faculty. She pushed instead for a two-day student strike.

Mrs. Clinton said she came to believe that “taking to the streets” and “giving speeches” was not enough to stir real change — a claim that would foreshadow much of her advocacy work, as well as one of her recurring critiques of Mr. Obama.

After Wellesley, she went to Yale Law School. Though it teemed with radical activism in the early 1970s — and New Haven was aflame over a Black Panthers murder trial — Mrs. Clinton immersed herself in the less inflammatory field of child advocacy. She provided legal help for victims of child abuse and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services, spending months on a case involving a foster mother at risk of losing custody of a 2-year-old girl.

A Move to the South

By the time Mrs. Clinton moved to Arkansas in 1974, she had acquired a number of African-American friends and colleagues. She also had difficulty accepting what she saw as remnants of the “Old South.” She was appalled that Mr. Faubus, the segregationist governor, still had a following and opposed Bill Clinton in the Democratic primary for governor in 1986. Mr. Faubus lost with 33 per cent of the vote. (“You could put a chicken on the ballot,” she says now, “and he’d get 30 percent.”)

In the interview, Mrs. Clinton recalled meeting Mr. Faubus in the mid-1970s. She described him as talented, beginning his gubernatorial career as a progressive who improved roads, schools and mental hospitals. “And then he made a Faustian bargain in 1957 because he threw his lot in with the forces of darkness,” she said.

In Washington, as in Arkansas, Mrs. Clinton viewed civil rights within her broader portfolio of causes. Maggie Williams, her former chief of staff as first lady and a current campaign adviser, said that those interests were inevitably fused. “Low wages, poor health care and lack of educational opportunities disproportionately impact people of color in this country,” Ms. Williams said.

Professor Lani Guinier of Harvard Law School, who is supporting Mr. Obama, said the key distinction between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton lies in how they view their relationship to power. In doing so, Ms. Guinier, whose nomination as assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993 was pummeled by conservative groups and aborted by the White House, referred to their respective biographies.

Mrs. Clinton “is the talented lawyer serving her clients,” Ms. Guinier said. Mr. Obama is the organizer, she said, “who sees the source of his power as the ability to inspire people to mobilize.”

Referring to the possibility of the nation’s election of a historic first, a black or a woman, Mrs. Clinton said last week, “In a way, it’s a good problem to have. But it is a problem.”

    Clinton’s Gradual Education on Issues of Race, NYT, 2.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/02/us/politics/02race.html?hp

Police Shooting

of Mother and Infant

Exposes a City’s

Racial Tension

January 30, 2008
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER MAAG

LIMA, Ohio — The air of Southside is foul-smelling and thick, filled with fumes from an oil refinery and diesel smoke from a train yard, with talk of riot and recrimination, and with angry questions: Why is Tarika Wilson dead? Why did the police shoot her baby?

“This thing just stinks to high heaven, and the police know it,” said Jason Upthegrove, president of the Lima chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. “We’re not asking for answers anymore. We’re demanding them.”

Some facts are known. A SWAT team arrived at Ms. Wilson’s rented house in the Southside neighborhood early in the evening of Jan. 4 to arrest her companion, Anthony Terry, on suspicion of drug dealing, said Greg Garlock, Lima’s police chief. Officers bashed in the front door and entered with guns drawn, said neighbors who saw the raid.

Moments later, the police opened fire, killing Ms. Wilson, 26, and wounding her 14-month-old son, Sincere, Chief Garlock said. One officer involved in the raid, Sgt. Joseph Chavalia, a 31-year veteran, has been placed on paid administrative leave.

Beyond these scant certainties, there is mostly rumor and rage. The police refuse to give any account of the raid, pending an investigation by the Ohio attorney general.

Black people in Lima, from the poorest citizens to religious and business leaders, complain that rogue police officers regularly stop them without cause, point guns in their faces, curse them and physically abuse them. They say the shooting of Ms. Wilson is only the latest example of a long-running pattern of a few white police officers treating African-Americans as people to be feared.

“There is an evil in this town,” said C. M. Manley, 68, pastor of New Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church. “The police harass me. They harass my family. But they know that if something happens to me, people will burn down this town.”

Internal investigations have uncovered no evidence of police misconduct, Chief Garlock said. Still, local officials recognize that the perception of systemic racism has opened a wide chasm.

“The situation is very tense,” Mayor David J. Berger said. “Serious threats have been made. People are starting to carry weapons to protect themselves.”

Surrounded by farm country known for its German Catholic roots and conservative politics, Lima is the only city in the immediate area with a significant African-American population. Black families, including Mr. Manley’s, came to Lima in the 1940s and ’50s for jobs at what is now the Husky Energy Lima Refinery and other factories along the city’s southern border. Blacks make up 27 percent of the city’s 38,000 people, Mr. Berger said.

Many blacks still live downwind from the refinery. Many whites on the police force commute from nearby farm towns, where a black face is about as common as a twisty road. Of Lima’s 77 police officers, two are African-American.

“If I have any frustration when I retire, it’ll be that I wasn’t able to bring more racial balance to the police force,” said Chief Garlock, who joined the force in 1971 and has been chief for 11 years.

Tarika Wilson had six children, ages 8 to 1. They were fathered by five men, all of whom dealt drugs, said Darla Jennings, Ms. Wilson’s mother. But Ms. Wilson never took drugs nor allowed them to be sold from her house, said Tania Wilson, her sister.

“She took great care of those kids, without much help from the fathers, and the community respected her for that,” said Ms. Wilson’s uncle, John Austin.

Tarika Wilson’s companion, Mr. Terry, was the subject of a long-term drug investigation, Chief Garlock said, but Ms. Wilson was never a suspect.

During the raid, Ms. Wilson’s youngest son, Sincere, was shot in the left shoulder and hand. Three weeks after the shooting, he remains in fair condition, said a spokeswoman at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.

Within minutes of the shooting, at around 8 p.m., 50 people gathered outside Ms. Wilson’s home and shouted obscenities at the police, neighbors said. The next day, 300 people gathered at the house and marched two miles to City Hall.

Many protesters believe they saw snipers atop police headquarters. The men on the roof were actually photographers, Chief Garlock said.

“The police can say whatever they want,” Tania Wilson said. “Even before they shot my sister, I didn’t trust them.”

Smaller marches have continued every week since the shooting. The N.A.A.C.P. will hold a public meeting on Saturday to air complaints about police brutality. The group will soon request that the Department of Justice investigate the police department and the Allen County prosecutor’s office, Mr. Upthegrove said.

Junior Cook was a neighbor of Tarika Wilson. He says that he watched from his front porch as the SWAT team raced across his front yard, and that seconds later he watched a police officer run from Ms. Wilson’s house carrying a bleeding baby in a blanket.

“The cops in Lima, they is racist like no tomorrow,” said Mr. Cook, 56. “Why else would you shoot a mother with a baby in her arms?”

    Police Shooting of Mother and Infant Exposes a City’s Racial Tension, NYT, 30.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/us/30lima.html

Obama Cites

Diversity of Voters in Win

January 27, 2008
Filed at 1:02 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- An exultant Barack Obama said his overwhelming win in South Carolina disproved notions that Democratic voters are deeply divided along racial lines.

''We have the most votes, the most delegates, and the most diverse coalition of Americans we've seen in a long, long time,'' the Illinois senator told joyful supporters at a rally. ''They are young and old; rich and poor. They are black and white; Latino and Asian.''

As if anticipating his remarks, his supporters chanted ''Race doesn't matter'' before Obama took the stage in Columbia, and again as he spoke for 20 minutes.

Obama praised runners-up Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards without naming them. But he took a veiled shot at the sometimes edgy comments made by the former first lady and former President Clinton in recent days.

''We're looking to fundamentally change the status quo in Washington,'' Obama said. ''And right now, that status quo is fighting back with everything it's got; with the same old tactics that divide and distract us from solving the problems people face.''

''We are up against the idea that it's acceptable to say anything and do anything to win an election,'' Obama said. ''We know that this is exactly what's wrong with our politics. This is why people don't believe what their leaders say anymore. This is why they tune out. And this election is our chance to give the American people a reason to believe again.''

The crowd repeatedly chanted, ''Yes we can!''

With wins in heavily white Iowa and in South Carolina, where about half of Saturday's voters were black, Obama said he has proven he can win in any region.

He said he wants to disprove ''the assumption that young people are apathetic'' and ''the assumption that African-Americans can't support the white candidate; whites can't support the African-American candidate; blacks and Latinos can't come together.''

Even as he spoke, Obama got a boost from Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy.

''Over the years, I've been deeply moved by the people who've told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president,'' she wrote in the Sunday's edition of The New York Times. ''That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.''

After his speech, Obama flew to Macon, Ga., where he planned to attend a church service Sunday before campaigning in Birmingham, Ala. He planned to return to Washington to attend President Bush's State of the Union address Monday night.

    Obama Cites Diversity of Voters in Win, NYT, 27.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Obama.html

Strong Black Vote Gives Obama Win

January 27, 2008
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:19 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Landslide margins among black voters powered Barack Obama to his win Saturday in South Carolina's Democratic presidential primary, allowing him to overcome the telling edge Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards had among whites.

Blacks made up 55 percent of the voters in Saturday's contest, slightly more than turned out in the state's primary four years ago and by far their biggest share in any presidential contest so far this year. Obama won 78 percent of their votes, with black men and women supporting the Illinois senator by about that same margin, according to exit polls of Democratic voters conducted Saturday for The Associated Press and the networks.

Clinton and Edwards split the white vote about equally, with each getting support from nearly four in 10 and Obama getting about a quarter. Obama's high-water mark among white voters so far this year has been the 36 percent he got in New Hampshire, where he finished second overall to Clinton; he also got a third of the white vote in the year's first contest in Iowa, enough for him to win overall in that state.

Highlighting the decisive role race played in Saturday's voting, eight in 10 of Obama's votes came from blacks. About six in 10 of Clinton's and nearly all of Edwards' came from whites.

One segment of whites with whom Obama did well was young people. He won backing from half of white voters under age 30, with Clinton and Edwards splitting the rest. Young white voters, however, made up only about one-twentieth of those who voted Saturday.

Racial attitudes were also in play in voters' perceptions of how effective the candidates would be if elected. Whites were far likelier to name Clinton than Obama as being most qualified to be commander in chief, likeliest to unite the country and most apt to capture the White House in November. Blacks named Obama over Clinton by even stronger margins -- two- and three-to one -- in all three areas.

Following a week of criticism between the Obama and Clinton campaigns in which race became a factor, Obama's relatively small share of white supporters in South Carolina could raise questions about his ability to attract those voters in the crucial Super Tuesday contests on Feb. 5, when nearly half the country will vote.

Because of his heavy support from blacks, Obama negated the advantage Clinton has enjoyed among women in most of this year's contests. He got more than half the female vote, compared with three in 10 supporting Clinton, the New York senator.

But the gender breakdown was heavily affected by race. Though Obama won eight in 10 votes of black females, Clinton and Edwards led among white women, getting about four in 10 of their votes, about double Obama's share.

Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, led among white men, garnering about four in 10 of their votes, with Clinton and Obama about equally sharing the rest.

In a race featuring candidates who would be the country's first female or first black president, about three-quarters of Democrats said they thought the country was ready for either historic event to occur. And in a show of general Democratic satisfaction with their choices, more than eight in 10 overall said they would be satisfied if Obama were the nominee, while about three-quarters said the same about Clinton.

Bill Clinton's campaigning in the state -- in which he engaged in some of the campaign's sharpest attacks on Obama -- was cited as an important factor by nearly six in 10 voters, including about equal amounts of blacks and whites.

Overall, those who said it was important voted in favor of Obama, though by smaller margins than those who said it was unimportant, suggesting his effort may have helped Hillary Clinton slightly.

As has been the pattern in most of the Democratic contests this year, the economy was cited as the most important issue facing the nation by far, with about half naming it. About half of those voters backed Obama and about three in 10 supported Clinton. Obama had an even bigger edge among voters naming health care or the war in Iraq as the top problem.

In another replay of Democratic sentiment from other states' voting, about half said they wanted a candidate who can bring change, making it the most sought-after quality. And once again this was dominated by Obama, who has made it the leading theme of his campaign, as he won three in four voters who named it.

Obama and Edwards about evenly split the lead among voters who said they wanted a candidate who feels empathy for people like them. Clinton, as she has done in the past, won easily among those favoring experience, but they were a small share of voters, fewer than one in five.

The poll was conducted for AP and the television networks by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International as Democratic voters exited 35 sites in South Carolina. The poll interviewed 1,905 Democratic primary voters and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

(This version CORRECTS SUBS graf 9 to correct that Edwards shared lead among white women.)

    Strong Black Vote Gives Obama Win, NYT, 27.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Primary-Exit-Poll.html

Analysis:

Racial Divide Could Hurt Obama

January 27, 2008
Filed at 12:33 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The questions surrounding Barack Obama's victory in South Carolina: Was the split between white and black voters an anomaly in a state were the Confederate flag still flies on the statehouse grounds? Or has the Clinton campaign successfully marginalized him as the ''black candidate?''

What's clear is that for Obama to win the nomination, he will have to improve his performance among white voters over South Carolina. Being the clear favorite among blacks won't be enough as the candidates turn to 22 states that hold contests on Feb. 5.

Obama's overwhelming victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton came with 80 percent of South Carolina's black voters backing him, but only a quarter of whites. Clinton and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards each got about a third of the white vote.

That's a division Obama will have to close if he is to win the nomination.

''The choice in this election is not between regions or religions or genders,'' Obama said in his victory speech Saturday night, delivered with mostly white supporters seated behind him. ''It's not about rich versus poor, young versus old, and it is not about black versus white. It's about the past versus the future.''

Obama has proven that he has appeal among whites. He won Iowa, one of the whitest states in the country, and won more than a third of white voters in multi-candidate contests in New Hampshire and Nevada -- even though Clinton won both states.

But that changed in South Carolina, where racial tensions still run high. The state delivered a stunning rejection to Hillary Rodham Clinton and perhaps even more so her husband, famously regarded as the ''first black president.'' The black voters of South Carolina said they wanted Obama in the White House instead of another Clinton.

Bill Clinton was the one who worked the state all week long as Obama's chief critic, even as his wife turned her attention to the states voting on Feb. 5 in anticipation of the loss. Voters listened -- more than half said the former president's campaigning was an important factor in their decision, according to exit polls collected by The Associated Press and television networks. But people who said Bill Clinton's campaigning made a difference in their vote still supported Obama.

Among those voters was Iris Gladden, a self-described news junkie and black voter who lives in rural Timmonsville, S.C. She struggled all year to decide whether to support Clinton or Obama. She said the decision was made when she heard Bill Clinton lambaste Obama for his position on the Iraq war. She said she was offended by the Clintons' air of entitlement and cast her vote Saturday for Obama.

''He said, `Give me a break, is this a fairy tale,''' Gladden said. ''Even when he was advised to cut down on it, he didn't. Based on that negativity, I made up my mind.''

Asked whether Bill Clinton hurt his wife's candidacy, South Carolina Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn said, ''I don't know whether he hurt it or not, but I don't think it was very helpful. I know the early polls I saw a months ago, she was leading Obama in the state by double digits. So something happened.''

Clyburn said the campaign should move away from race now to talk about the future of the country.

''I think those people that were campaigning, drawing attention to this man's race and trying to get him off message, I think those people were rejected tonight,'' Clyburn said.

But however much Bill Clinton may have hurt his wife's candidacy, his effort may also have hurt Obama's image as a candidate who can cross racial lines.

Bill Clinton suggested that Obama's victory was an indicator of black support and not of real strength. ''Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88,'' the former president said Saturday as voters went to the polls. ''Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.''

For example, black voters were just 8 percent of the turnout in the California Democratic primary four years ago. They were 15 percent in Missouri, 20 percent in New York, 23 percent in Tennessee and 47 percent in Georgia -- all states that are among those that will vote 10 days after South Carolina.

''He won fair and square,'' Bill Clinton said of Obama Saturday night. ''Now we go to February 5 when millions of Americans finally get in the act.''

In South Carolina, race was a more important factor than gender. Obama defeated Clinton among both women and men, winning just more than half the support of each gender. Clinton won only about three in 10 women overall.

But the gender breakdown was racially tinged. Clinton got four in 10 white females, compared with a third for Edwards and one in five for Obama. Edwards won about four in 10 white males, while Clinton and Obama each won about three in 10.

But, surprisingly, Obama ran almost even with Clinton among white males -- 29 percent to 27 percent -- which the Obama campaign took as a bright sign going forward.

------

Nedra Pickler covers the Democratic presidential campaign for The Associated Press.

    Analysis: Racial Divide Could Hurt Obama, NYT, 27.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-South-Carolina-Dems-Analysis.html

Today in History - Jan. 21

January 21, 2008
Filed at 12:05 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

Today is Monday, Jan. 21, the 21st day of 2008. There are 345 days left in the year. This is the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Today's Highlight in History:

On Jan. 21, 1958, Charles Starkweather, 19, killed the mother, stepfather and half-sister of his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, at her family's home in Lincoln, Neb. (Starkweather, who had also killed a gas station attendant the previous November, and Fugate went on a road trip which resulted in seven more slayings. Starkweather was executed in 1959; Fugate, who maintained she had been Starkweather's hostage, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life; she was paroled in 1976.)

On this date:

In 1793, during the French Revolution, King Louis the XVI, condemned for treason, was executed on the guillotine.

In 1858, Felix Marma Zuloaga became president of Mexico upon the ouster of Ignacio Comonfort.

In 1908, New York City's Board of Aldermen passed an ordinance prohibiting women from smoking in public. (However, the measure was vetoed by Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. two weeks later).

In 1915, the first Kiwanis Club was founded, in Detroit.

In 1924, Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin died at age 53.

In 1950, former State Department official Alger Hiss, accused of being part of a Communist spy ring, was found guilty in New York of lying to a grand jury. (Hiss, who always proclaimed his innocence, served less than four years in prison.)

In 1954, the first atomic submarine, the USS Nautilus, was launched at Groton, Conn. (However, the Nautilus did not make its first nuclear-powered run until nearly a year later).

In 1968, the Battle of Khe Sahn began during the Vietnam War as North Vietnamese forces attacked a U.S. Marine base; the Americans were able to hold their position until the siege was lifted 2 1/2 months later.

In 1968, an American B-52 bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs crashed in Greenland, killing one crew member and scattering radioactive material.

In 1976, the supersonic Concorde jet was put into service by Britain and France.

Ten years ago: President Bill Clinton angrily denied reports he had had an affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and then tried to get her to lie about it. Pope John Paul II began a historic pilgrimage to Cuba. Actor Jack Lord of ''Hawaii Five-O'' fame died in Honolulu at age 77.

Five years ago: The Census Bureau announced that Hispanics had surpassed blacks as America's largest minority group. A powerful earthquake shook west-central Mexico, killing 28 people and leaving 10,000 homeless. A gunman ambushed two U.S. defense workers in Kuwait, killing one and wounding another. Colombian rebels kidnapped an American photographer and a British reporter, the first time foreign journalists were abducted in Colombia's four-decade-long civil war. (Scott Dalton and Ruth Morris were freed after 11 days in captivity.)

One year ago: Venzuelan President Hugo Chavez told U.S. officials to ''Go to hell, gringos!'' and called Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ''missy'' on his weekly radio and TV show, lashing out at Washington for what he called unacceptable meddling in his country's affairs. Lovie Smith became the first black head coach to make it to the Super Bowl when his Chicago Bears won the NFC championship, beating the New Orleans Saints 39-14; Tony Dungy became the second when his Indianapolis Colts took the AFC title over the New England Patriots, 38-34.

Today's Birthdays: Actor Paul Scofield is 86. Actress Ann Wedgeworth is 73. Blues singer-musician Snooks Eaglin is 72. Golfer Jack Nicklaus is 68. Opera singer Placido Domingo is 67. Singer Richie Havens is 67. Singer Mac Davis is 66. Actress Jill Eikenberry is 61. Country musician Jim Ibbotson (The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band) is 61. Singer-songwriter Billy Ocean is 58. Actor Robby Benson is 52. Actress Geena Davis is 52. Basketball player Hakeem Olajuwon is 45. Actress Charlotte Ross is 40. Actor John Ducey is 39. Actress Karina Lombard is 39. Rapper Levirt (B-Rock and the Bizz) is 38. Rock musician Mark Trojanowski (Sister Hazel) is 38. Rock DJ Chris Kilmore (Incubus) is 35. Singer Emma Bunton (Spice Girls) is 32. Rhythm-and-blues singer Nokio (Dru Hill) is 29. Actress Izabella Miko is 27.

Thought for Today: ''Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair.'' -- George Burns, American comedian (1896-1996).

    Today in History - Jan. 21, NYT, 21.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-History.html

Bush Honors MLK's Memory

January 21, 2008
Filed at 12:06 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush on Monday hailed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a towering figure and called on the nation's people to honor the slain civil rights leader by helping those in need.

''Our fellow citizens have got to understand that by loving a neighbor like you'd like to be loved yourself, by reaching out to someone who hurts, by just simply living a life of kindness and compassion, you can make America a better place and fulfill the dream of Martin Luther King,'' Bush said at a library named for the slain civil rights leader.

With first lady Laura Bush at his side, Bush spoke briefly on the federal holiday honoring the birthday of King, who would have been 79 on Jan. 15.

An advocate of peaceful resistance and equality for people of all races, King was assassinated in April 1968.

Bush said that King's holiday offers a chance to ''renew our deep desire for America to be a land of promise for everybody, a land of justice, and a land of opportunity.'' He said it should be a ''day on'' of volunteering -- not a day off -- and encouraged people to do community service year-round.

The setting for Bush was the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown Washington. The building features a colorful mural that depicts scenes from King's life and celebrates his role in the march toward social justice.

''Martin Luther King is a towering figure in the history of our country,'' Bush said. ''And it is fitting that we honor his service and his courage and his vision.''

Bush spoke after participating in a story-time session with a handful of children who grew shy in his presence. The president posted a few pictures on a bulletin board as the young students learned how King fought to change unfair laws.

When the kids were asked how they could make the world a better place, none of them spoke up. So Bush did for them.

''Love your neighbor,'' he said emphatically. ''Volunteer,'' chimed in the first lady.

Bush has marked the King holiday in different ways during his presidency. Among other events, he has viewed the Emancipation Proclamation at a special showing at the National Archives, placed a wreath at King's grave, spoken at a predominantly black Baptist church and helped spruce up a high school.

    Bush Honors MLK's Memory, NYT, 21.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html

Hundreds Honor King at Atlanta Church

January 21, 2008
Filed at 2:14 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

ATLANTA (AP) -- Hundreds of civil rights leaders and others crowded Martin Luther King Jr.'s Ebenezer Baptist Church on Monday to celebrate the man and his legacy.

''We would be remiss if we did not commemorate Martin Luther King Jr., a champion of peace in a time of war,'' said Isaac Newton Farris Jr., a nephew of King.

The King Center has asked the nation to commemorate his birthday for 40 years -- for more years than the civil rights leader lived, Farris said. King was assassinated at age 39 on April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tenn. He would have turned 79 this year.

Farris urged diplomacy, economic incentives and other nonviolent efforts ''as an alternative to military intervention to end the war in Iraq.''

Former President Bill Clinton, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin were among the dignitaries attending the ceremony.

''Martin aimed high, acted with faith, dreamed miracles that inspired a nation. Can we act on King's legacy without dreaming? I think not,'' she said. ''King's legacy gives light to our hopes, permission to our aspirations and relevance to our dreams.''

Clinton told the congregation he appointed more black officials in his administration than all other previous presidents combined ''not because of me, but because of the influence of Martin Luther King in my life.''

''He freed us all to fight the civil rights battle, to fight the poverty battle, to fight all these battles and do it together,'' Clinton said. ''He made a place at the table for all of us. He made the beloved community possible.''

Clinton noted the diverse presidential race that includes a Mormon, a black man and a Baptist preacher as well as his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

''Isn't this interesting? I mean, how cool is it? You know, we've got all these different people seeking the presidency,'' he said. ''And guess what? It's all possible because of Martin Luther King's vision of the beloved community.''

The holiday has been observed at Ebenezer Baptist Church -- where King preached from 1960 until 1968 -- every year since his death. But it holds a new political significance this week because it falls closer to primary elections than in past years, since many states moved up their balloting.

South Carolina, which has a large black electorate in the Democratic primary, votes on Jan. 26. And King's home state, Georgia, will be part of the Super Tuesday voting on Feb. 5, along with California, New York and 22 other states.

King's actual birthday is Jan. 15, but the federal holiday is observed on the third Monday in January. It has been a national holiday since 1986.

His widow, Coretta Scott King, worked for more than a decade to establish her husband's birthday as a federal holiday. She died in 2006 at age 78.

------

Associated Press writers Daniel Yee and Greg Bluestein in Atlanta contributed to this report.

    Hundreds Honor King at Atlanta Church, NYT, 21.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-King-Holiday.html

Leaders gather to honor King's legacy

21 January 2008
USA Today
From wire reports

Nearly 40 years after he was assassinated, civil rights and political leaders Monday are commemorating the life of Martin Luther King Jr. on the holiday that bears his name.

At Ebenzer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where King once preached, hundreds of people gathered to celebrate his legacy.

"We would be remiss if we did not commemorate Martin Luther King Jr., a champion of peace in a time of war," said Isaac Newton Farris Jr., a nephew of King.

King was assassinated at age 39 on April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis He would have turned 79 this year.

Farris urged diplomacy, economic incentives and other non-violent efforts "as an alternative to military intervention to end the war in Iraq."

Former president Bill Clinton, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin were among the dignitaries attending the ceremony. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama spoke at the church Sunday.

The holiday has been observed at the church — where King preached from 1960 until 1968 — every year since his death. But it holds a new political significance this week because it falls closer to primary elections than in past years, since many states moved up their balloting.

South Carolina, which has a large black electorate in the Democratic primary, votes Jan. 26. And King's home state, Georgia, will be part of the Super Tuesday voting on Feb. 5, along with California, New York and more than 20 other states.

The top three Democratic presidential contenders planned to join thousands of others Monday in a march in Columbia, S.C. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama and John Edwards planned to appear at an NAACP-sponsored march to the state Capitol, where the Confederate flag still flies on the grounds.

In Washington, President Bush hailed King as a towering figure and called on the country to honor his legacy by showing compassion to those in need.

"It's fitting that we honor his service and his courage and his vision," Bush said during a visit to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library with first lady Laura Bush.

The president said that the federal holiday in King's memory is "an opportunity to renew our deep desire for America to be a land of promise to everybody."

King's actual birthday is Jan. 15, but the federal holiday is observed on the third Monday in January. It has been a national holiday since 1986.

His widow, Coretta Scott King, worked for more than a decade to establish her husband's birthday as a federal holiday. She died in 2006 at age 78.
 

Contributing: Associated Press; Kathy Kiely in Columbia, S.C.

    Leaders gather to honor King's legacy, UT, 21.1.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-01-21-mlk-monday_N.htm

Historians Fear MLK's Legacy Being Lost

January 21, 2008
Filed at 9:23 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Nearly 40 years after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., some say his legacy is being frozen in a moment in time that ignores the full complexity of the man and his message.

''Everyone knows -- even the smallest kid knows about Martin Luther King -- can say his most famous moment was that 'I have a dream' speech,'' said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo. ''No one can go further than one sentence. All we know is that this guy had a dream. We don't know what that dream was.''

King was working on anti-poverty and anti-war issues at the time of his death. He had spoken out against the Vietnam War and was in Memphis when he was killed in April 1968 in support of striking sanitation workers.

King had come a long way from the crowds who cheered him at the 1963 March on Washington, when he was introduced as ''the moral leader of our nation'' -- and when he pronounced ''I have a dream'' on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

By taking on issues outside segregation, he had lost the support of many newspapers and magazines, and his relationship with the White House had suffered, said Harvard Sitkoff, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire who has written a recently published book on King.

''He was considered by many to be a pariah,'' Sitkoff said.

But he took on issues of poverty and militarism because he considered them vital ''to make equality something real and not just racial brotherhood but equality in fact,'' Sitkoff said.

Scholarly study of King hasn't translated into the popular perception of him and the civil rights movement, said Richard Greenwald, professor of history at Drew University.

''We're living increasingly in a culture of top 10 lists, of celebrity biopics which simplify the past as entertainment or mythology,'' he said. ''We lose a view on what real leadership is by compressing him down to one window.''

That does a disservice to both King and society, said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University.

By freezing him at that point, by putting him on a pedestal of perfection that doesn't acknowledge his complex views, ''it makes it impossible both for us to find new leaders and for us to aspire to leadership,'' Harris-Lacewell said.

She believes it's important for Americans in 2008 to remember how disliked King was before his death in April 1968.

''If we forget that, then it seems like the only people we can get behind must be popular,'' Harris-Lacewell said. ''Following King meant following the unpopular road, not the popular one.''

In becoming an icon, King's legacy has been used by people all over the political spectrum, said Glenn McNair, associate professor of history at Kenyon College.

He's been part of the 2008 presidential race, in which Barack Obama could be the country's first black president. Obama has invoked King, and Sen. John Kerry endorsed Obama by saying ''Martin Luther King said that the time is always right to do what is right.''

Not all the references have been received well. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton came under fire when she was quoted as saying King's dream of racial equality was realized only when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

King has ''slipped into the realm of symbol that people use and manipulate for their own purposes,'' McNair said.

Harris-Lacewell said that is something people need to push back against.

''It's not OK to slip into flat memory of who Dr. King was, it does no justice to us and makes him to easy to appropriate,'' she said. ''Every time he gets appropriated, we have to come out and say that's not OK. We do have the ability to speak back.''

    Historians Fear MLK's Legacy Being Lost, NYT, 21.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-MLK-Legacy.html

Hundreds Gather

at King's Atlanta Church

January 21, 2008
Filed at 1:00 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

ATLANTA (AP) -- Hundreds of civil rights leaders and others crowded Martin Luther King Jr.'s Ebenezer Baptist Church on Monday to the celebrate the man and his legacy.

''We would be remiss if we did not commemorate Martin Luther King Jr., a champion of peace in a time of war,'' said Isaac Newton Farris Jr., a nephew of King.

The King Center has asked the nation to commemorate his birthday for 40 years -- for more years than the civil rights leader lived, Farris said. King was assassinated at age 39 on April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tenn. He would have turned 79 this year.

Farris urged diplomacy, economic incentives and other nonviolent efforts ''as an alternative to military intervention to end the war in Iraq.''

Former President Bill Clinton, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin were among the dignitaries attending the ceremony.

''Martin aimed high, acted with faith, dreamed miracles that inspired a nation. Can we act on King's legacy without dreaming? I think not,'' she said. ''King's legacy gives light to our hopes, permission to our aspirations and relevance to our dreams.''

Clinton told the congregation he appointed more black officials in his administration than all other previous presidents combined ''not because of me, but because of the influence of Martin Luther King in my life.''

''He freed us all to fight the civil rights battle, to fight the poverty battle, to fight all these battles and do it together,'' Clinton said. ''He made a place at the table for all of us. He made the beloved community possible.''

Clinton noted the diverse presidential race that includes a Mormon, a black man and a Baptist preacher as well as his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

''How cool is it? You got all these different people seeking the presidency,'' he said. ''And guess what? It's all possible because of Martin Luther King's vision of the beloved community.''

The holiday has been observed at Ebenezer Baptist Church -- where King preached from 1960 until 1968 -- every year since his death. But it holds a new political significance this week because it falls closer to primary elections than in past years, since many states moved up their balloting.

South Carolina, which has a large black electorate in the Democratic primary, votes on Jan. 26. And King's home state, Georgia, will be part of the Super Tuesday voting on Feb. 5, along with California, New York and 22 other states.

King's actual birthday is Jan. 15, but the federal holiday is observed on the third Monday in January. It has been a national holiday since 1986.

His widow, Coretta Scott King, worked for more than a decade to establish her husband's birthday as a federal holiday. She died in 2006 at age 78.

    Hundreds Gather at King's Atlanta Church, NYT, 21.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-King-Holiday.html

40 years after the riots,

King's vision 'unfinished'

20 January 2008
USA Today
By Marisol Bello and Judy Keen

Four decades later, the rioting sparked by the assassination of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. is a fading memory to many Americans, preserved on grainy photographs and film.

In many of the 125 cities that were hit by violence, however, the images remain vivid — especially the fires and destruction that symbolized the outrage in mostly African-American neighborhoods, and that continue to reshape them today. At a time when whites were leaving cities for the suburbs, the rioting that left 46 people dead, 2,600 injured and 21,000 arrested hastened the departure of middle-class black families — and made King's dream of equality and opportunity seem more distant in the very neighborhoods where his message had resonated.

Today, some of the neighborhoods hit hardest by the rioting are experiencing a rebirth. Others are still struggling to heal.

In Washington, the once-charred corridors along H Street Northeast and 14th Street Northwest have condos and nightclubs that attract young singles, whose arrival has energized the area — but raised concerns that the remaining black families won't be able to afford to stay as redevelopment continues.

Elsewhere, the outlook is less encouraging: On Kansas City's east side, poverty and blight have overwhelmed hopes of restoring a once-vibrant neighborhood devastated by the rioting after King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

And in Chicago's North Lawndale area, there is disappointment that a community of historic homes where King himself once lived has not rebounded in a significant way.

The riots were the crest in a wave of civil unrest in the 1960s that led a national commission to warn a month before King's slaying that the USA was "moving toward two societies, one white, one black — separate and unequal."

At the time of his death, King had been planning a campaign against poverty. Today, the neighborhoods in Washington, Kansas City and Chicago reflect the challenge of his dream of equal opportunity for minorities and the poor.

"Dr. King's final battle was a battle of economics," says Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League. "Disparity in America has to be at the top of the national agenda again. Dr. King said it in 1968, and it remains true. This is his unfinished work."

As Americans commemorate King's birthday, USA TODAY asked those who endured the rioting in Washington, Kansas City and Chicago to describe the progress and challenges in their neighborhoods.

Hope in Washington

The once-vibrant H Street corridor, decimated by the riots, is coming back. Just ask Anwar Saleem.

The 53-year-old entrepreneur grew up in the predominantly black neighborhood surrounding H Street NE. He owns a hair salon and two buildings on the strip.

Saleem was 13 when the looting and violence erupted. He remembers the smoldering buildings that stood untouched for years. As an adult, he saw the crime and drug problems fueled by the neglect.

Today, he sees change.

During the past two years, bars and indie-rock venues have opened next to hair braiding salons, barber shops and mom-and-pop retailers. A 476-unit luxury apartment complex is scheduled to be completed by next month, and Saleem and other business owners are trying to attract a high-end grocery store.

Prices for the old retail buildings are up from an average of $125,000 five years ago to about $500,000 today, says Saleem, who founded a group called H Street Main Street to promote local businesses.

"I think Dr. King would have wanted any neighborhood to be economically viable," he says. "And in H Street, people of all races do business together. I think Dr. King's legacy is playing out here now."

About 60% of the stores on H Street today are black-owned, and about half of those owners also own their buildings, Saleem says. "We didn't have that opportunity in '68," he says. "We have it now."

The business district's re-emergence — aided by its closeness to downtown Washington and a subway system that has been built since the riots — has created what amounts to two neighborhoods.

By day, many African-Americans who moved away maintain their ties to H Street in errands to banks and pharmacies. They frequent the black-owned barber shops and salons and the dwindling number of familiar stores.

"I used to know every store owner," says Michael Watts, 35, who grew up a block from the strip and worked part-time in several of the stores when he was a teen. "Now it's different. There are a lot of changes on H Street."

At night, new residents in the neighborhood seem to take over, cramming the hip bars and restaurants. The newcomers are mostly young, professional and white.

Dakota Bixler, 24, raised on a farm in South Dakota, and Michelle Warren, 25, from suburban Maryland, have rented a partly renovated five-bedroom house off of H Street since September.

"A few years ago, it was not so wise to live here, but they're really cleaning it up," says Bixler, a U.S. Senate aide.

The revival brings hope but also worries for longtime residents and business owners such as George Butler. After the riots, Butler opened his men's store, George's Place, at 10th and H streets NE with the help of a government grant.

He's happy that the transformation means more police patrols, new store facades and cleaner sidewalks, but he fears that King's dream of equal opportunity will be threatened if blacks are pushed out as the neighborhood gentrifies.

"The neighborhood now has taken a different type of turn because what they're trying to do here is to bring another Georgetown to this area," says Butler, 68, referring to Washington's tony historic neighborhood.

Such concerns about H Street's revival stem from what has happened in Washington's other riot corridor, the area around 14th and U streets NW. Trendy bars and expensive condos have replaced family-owned stores, which were pushed out by rising taxes and high-end stores.

"Hardly any African-Americans live on 14th Street," says Walter Fauntroy, who grew up near 14th and U and was King's representative in Washington.

"If you go to every major city in the country where low- and moderate-income people lived on valuable city land, it's now being gentrified," he says. "They are moving all those people out. … If ever we needed the kind of programs that Martin Luther King Jr. had in mind, we need them now."

Butler, who also is concerned that black residents are being "priced out of this city, and this corridor," doesn't want his business to be left behind. He plans to sell more polo shirts, button-down collared shirts and khakis that he hopes will appeal to the new residents.

"I've got to change my operations," he says. "I've got to do a whole lot of shifting if I'm going to stay on this corner."

In Kansas City, it 'all fell apart'

On the forlorn streets in parts of Kansas City's east side, where one-third of the mostly black residents live in poverty and one-fifth of the buildings are vacant, King's dream labors under crushing unemployment and poverty.

It wasn't always this way. Back when Rep. Emanuel Cleaver moved to the city in 1968 and worked as an organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, low- and middle-income blacks lived together on the east side. Doctors, dentists, teachers, even a few pro football players for the Kansas City Chiefs lived in the same neighborhood.

As fair housing laws were passed and blacks had more options, those who could afford it started moving out. The riots of 1968 accelerated the exodus, says Cleaver, who in 1991 became Kansas City's first black mayor. Eventually, those left behind were poor blacks.

"Things that were meant for good in turn created bad," Cleaver says. "Middle-class African-Americans were gone from the urban core, and that wreaks havoc in the lives of the people remaining."

Today, the areas destroyed in 1968 have seen little change. One of the rioting hot spots, at 31st and Prospect streets, was rebuilt with a library, fast-food joints and a strip mall, but other areas have not recovered. Vacant lots dominate the landscape, broken up by shuttered or run-down buildings and an occasional small store.

Three days of rioting left six dead and 312 buildings damaged. The violence began April 9 after police fired tear gas at 1,000 high school students who had gathered at City Hall to protest schools staying open the day of King's funeral.

The areas that saw the most unrest are in the 3rd District, which has lost 60% of its population since 1960, more than any other part of the city. Now, 70,000 people live there, down from almost 170,000 in 1960.

Opal Blankinship, 78, moved out seven years ago after her home was burglarized three times in 13 months. She and her husband, former city councilman G. Lawrence Blankinship, lived there 48 years. As families left, crime worsened.

Shirley Briscoe has seen the impact of white and middle-class black flight. The community spirit that bound the residents of her block has unraveled, she says.

When Briscoe and her husband bought their four-bedroom bungalow 42 years ago in a working-class neighborhood called Ivanhoe, it was on a street of well-manicured lawns, moms who joined the PTA and movies in a nearby park.

"There's a lot of history here, but that all fell apart after the riots," says Briscoe, 74. "As the years went by, families moved in and out. It was more transient."

Overall, blacks in Kansas City haven't fared well since 1968, says Gwendolyn Grant, president of the Urban League of Kansas City. "In every quality-of-life area, health, education, economics, social justice, we lag behind. … None of the things Dr. King dreamed of reached this place."

In Kansas City, she says, blacks are three times more likely than whites to be unemployed and half as likely to have access to quality health care, a pattern consistent with what nationwide studies have found. "We have a whole lot more work to do," Grant says, "to make Dr. King's dream a reality."

Impatience in Chicago

Driving through North Lawndale reminiscing about the shoe stores, dress shops and theaters that once prospered in the Chicago neighborhood, Art Turner lists the reasons the area should be booming again: The Loop, as Chicago's downtown is known, is 10 minutes away. Two interstates and three El (rail) lines are nearby. Historic greystone houses line the streets.

He's frustrated and disappointed by the lack of progress since 1968. "There has been some improvement," he says, "but no one would have thought it would take 40 years."

Turner grew up in North Lawndale, watched as scores of businesses burned in the riots, left to attend college in Indiana, then came home.

"The scars were still there," says Turner, 57, a Democrat who represents the neighborhood in the Illinois House. "I always felt that all those vacant lots, all those old burned-out buildings would eventually be businesses again. It never happened."

No other Chicago neighborhood has more vacant lots. In 1960, 124,937 people lived in North Lawndale. Today, there are 41,768. More than 40% of them are in families with incomes below the federal poverty line, about $20,650 for a family of four.

Every few blocks, there are a couple of new condos or a restored old home, but the housing slump has left many unsold. On South Hamlin Avenue, where King lived briefly in 1966 during a fair housing campaign, litter clutters the vacant lot where his tenement stood.

There's a new community center and a health clinic in the neighborhood. There are new small businesses. A high school is being built. On Roosevelt Road, a new Starbucks is near a large chain grocery.

There's concern, Turner says, that the grocery might close soon — another potential setback, because other franchises won't move into the neighborhood unless such anchor stores are there already. Strip malls have been lured into the neighborhood by tax incentives, then the stores quickly found they couldn't make it, Turner says.

It's difficult to attract people without basic services such as groceries and good schools. The blinking blue lights that identify police surveillance cameras in high-crime areas also seem to discourage potential newcomers from settling in North Lawndale.

When Zelma McMillan moved to North Lawndale in the 1950s, she thought her family was "moving up in the world." Unlike their old neighborhood closer to downtown, there were grand stone houses, thriving shops and people of all races. She felt safe. She had never seen so many trees and flowers.

Things began to change in the early 1960s. Many white families moved away, but everything you needed was within a few blocks, people still looked after each other and "everybody had a mother and father in the household."

Then King was assassinated. The neighborhood erupted, and the North Lawndale that McMillan loved was consumed by rage and flames.

David Dawley, a white community organizer in North Lawndale during the riots, remembers how the unrest began: "It was spontaneous combustion. The sidewalks were full of students shaking their fists and walking. … Then they started attacking white-owned stores. I saw a friend throw a trash barrel through a window. Pretty soon there were walls of flame everywhere."

McMillan, 60, is still waiting for her neighborhood's rebirth. A full-time volunteer at Operation Brotherhood, a community center, she walks six blocks from home to work feeling grateful for the cops who often are parked on the corner. King's message of hope feels distant to her now. "He's not a force in our lives," she says.

Many of North Lawndale's problems exist in other inner-city neighborhoods in Chicago and across the country, but longtime residents say King's death and the riots were catalysts for North Lawndale's decline.

"Our community just went down with the fires," says Sandrel Scott, 59. "That's what started our … deep hopelessness. We just didn't build ourselves back up. We've never had another leader like him to instill pride in us."

Willie Brooks, 55, a daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers who moved to the neighborhood when she was 13 and already in awe of King, still believes in his dream. She's less certain about North Lawndale's future, though.

"It's coming back," she says, "but it will never be like it was before."

    40 years after the riots, King's vision 'unfinished', UT, 20.1.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-01-20-riots-cover_N.htm

Obama's rise

stuns observers

of U.S. race relations

Mon Jan 7, 2008
11:40am EST
Reuters
By Matthew Bigg -Analysis

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (Reuters) - Barack Obama's sudden ascendancy to front-runner status among Democrats vying for the White House has opened what could be a new chapter in race relations in America.

Observers of the U.S. debate over race say that however fleeting this may be, Obama's victory in last week's Iowa caucuses shatters an assumption about black Americans in national politics. Iowa is largely white and rural.

The Illinois senator would be the first black president and several commentators and voters said the excitement over his candidacy has led them to imagine a softening of their long-held skepticism about black-white relations in the United States.

"Obama has stepped up out of the script and we are in uncharted waters," said William Jelani Cobb, history professor at Atlanta's Spelman College and the author of a recent book of essays on contemporary black culture.

Obama, 46, leads Sen. Hillary Clinton, 60, in opinion polls in New Hampshire, which votes on Tuesday in the state-by-state process of choosing Republican and Democratic candidates for November's election to succeed President George W. Bush.

Cobb said Obama's win in Iowa was striking because historically the first blacks to break into fields traditionally dominated by whites succeeded by offering continuity rather than reform.

Obama's campaign has stood for change.

RACIAL GAP

The sharp gap between America's white majority and blacks who make up around 13 percent of the population challenges the nation's sense of itself as a place of boundless opportunity.

African Americans on average experience higher mortality rates than whites and lower life expectancy despite a black middle class that has grown since the civil rights movement in the 1960s. They also earn far less on average and are more likely to be arrested, charged and incarcerated.

Those disparities are most stark in inner cities and have stoked debate between civil rights leaders and others who highlight prejudice as a cause. Conservatives say blacks should take responsibility for solving their problems.

Obama's appeal to white voters stems in part from his multicultural heritage as a child of a white American mother and a Kenyan father who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, commentators and voters said.

That and his optimistic message set him apart from other black politicians and helps him appear non-threatening, allowing many Democratic voters to feel good about his Iowa victory as a heartwarming story.

"To become that first black president, he doesn't seem to be looking at it from that point of view. He just wants people to vote for him because he's the right candidate," said Francis Charfauros, a coffee shop manager in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Obama has also followed Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and other black politicians who distanced themselves when they ran for office from civil rights leaders such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who crusade primarily for racial justice.

"He (Obama) is not fire-and-brimstone like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. He's an individual like the rest of us. We're not going to a revival meeting," said Al Bourque, a white retiree living in Portsmouth, N.H.

"I don't even think of him as being black. I'm looking at him as an individual. He appears thoughtful and exudes a lot of confidence," said Bourque, who supports Obama after vacillating between him and Clinton.

"RACE NEUTRALITY"

One effect of that "race neutrality" is that voters might consider him an exception, said author and commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who has written books on race and politics.

"Obama is able to elevate himself to the broader American public," he said. "There's always been this thing of black exceptionalism, to take and elevate some African Americans and say: 'You are different. You are well spoken, intelligent.'"

The next major Democratic primary after New Hampshire is on January 26 in the southern state of South Carolina, where Clinton has built a strong base in the large black community, which traditionally votes for Democratic candidates.

A brutal system of racial segregation prevailed in the South until the 1960s and no black has been elected to the U.S. Senate from the region for over a century.

Some older black leaders were reluctant to embrace Obama because they viewed so-called progressive whites such as Clinton as the best avenue for black interests while younger black voters were more likely to embrace Obama, analysts said.

But he might struggle to appeal to white voters in the South and parts of the country with a higher percentage of blacks than Iowa and New Hampshire, they said.

"As you get a larger number of black people in a community then you get racial tensions and divisions and racial attitudes harden," said Juan Williams, who has written books and made films about black history.

"Obama is giving us a brilliant demonstration of progress in race relations but to suggest that his success is proof that race is no longer an issue is naive or deceptive," he said.
 

(Additional reporting by Mark Egan and Fred Katayama in New Hampshire, Andrea Hopkins in Cincinnati, Peter Bohan in Chicago and Tim Gaynor in Phoenix)

(Editing by Howard Goller)

    Obama's rise stuns observers of U.S. race relations, R, 7.1.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN0739754020080107

Daring to Believe,

Blacks Savor Obama Victory

January 5, 2008
The New York Times
By DIANE CARDWELL

For Sadou Brown in a Los Angeles suburb, the decisive victory of Senator Barack Obama in Iowa was a moment to show his 14-year-old son what is possible.

For Mike Duncan in Maryland, it was a sign that Americans were moving beyond rigid thinking about race.

For Milton Washington in Harlem, it looked like the beginning of something he never thought that he would see. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re on the cusp of something big about to happen,’ ” Mr. Washington said.

How Mr. Obama’s early triumph will play out in the presidential contest remains to be seen, and his support among blacks is hardly monolithic.

But in dozens of interviews on Friday from suburbs of Houston to towns outside Chicago and rural byways near Birmingham, Ala., African-Americans voiced pride and amazement over his victory on Thursday and the message it sent, even if they were not planning to vote for him or were skeptical that he could win in November.

“My goodness, has it ever happened before, a black man, in our life, in our country?” asked Edith Lambert, 60, a graduate student in theology who was having lunch at the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston.

“It makes me feel proud that at a time when so many things are going wrong in the world that people can rise above past errors,” added Ms. Lambert, who said she had not decided whom to vote for. “It shows that people aren’t thinking small. They’re thinking large, outside the box.”

Other black presidential candidates, like Shirley A. Chisholm and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have excited voters in the past. Mr. Jackson won primaries in 1984 and 1988.

Over and over, blacks said Mr. Obama’s achievement in Iowa, an overwhelmingly white state, made him seem a viable crossover candidate, a fresh face with the first real shot at capturing a major party nomination.

“People across America, even in Iowa of all places, can look across the color line and see the person,” said Mr. Brown, 35, who was working at the reception desk at DK’s Hair Design near Ladera Heights, a wealthy Los Angeles suburb.

Describing himself as a “huge, huge supporter,” of Mr. Obama, Mr. Brown added: “So many times, our young people only have sports stars or musicians to look up to. But now, when we tell them to go to school, to aim high in life, they have a face to put with the ambition.”

Mildred Kerr, 68, a Republican who took her granddaughter to the salon for a trim and added that she did not plan to vote for Mr. Obama, said she was nonetheless happy that he had won, because he “can now have the encouragement to go on and pursue a victory.”

George F. Knox, 64, a lawyer and civic leader in Miami who supports Mr. Obama’s candidacy, made a similar point.

“The notion is mind-boggling,” Mr. Knox said. “When a virtual mandate to continue comes out of a place like Iowa, with only a 2 percent black population, it’s very important.”

Several blacks said Mr. Obama’s victory with a campaign not based on race could herald the emergence of a new political calculus.

“I think he’s already made a significant change in the mindset of people,” said Mike Duncan, 55, an Amtrak manager in Abingdon, Md. “Across the board, I’m glad to see that whites and blacks are beginning to understand that blacks can represent them and also be successful at it.”

Shannon Brown, 17, a high school senior on the South Side of Chicago, said she was thrilled that she would be eligible to vote by Election Day.

“I’ve actually seen him around the neighborhood and had conversations with him,” Ms. Brown said, calling Mr. Obama’s candidacy “history in the making” and “a wonderful experience for us as a people.”

She added, “It’s something I will be able to tell my kids when I grow up, that I voted for the first black president.”

Several supporters of Mr. Obama said they liked him for reasons other than race, including what they saw as his interest in stemming injustice and his projection of sincerity.

“I identify just because everything they ask, he is straightforward,” said Charlette Fleming, 26, an insurance agent who was buying lunch at a mall in The Woodlands, a suburb 30 miles north of Houston. “They put him on the spot because he did marijuana. I’ve never done drugs before. But he was: ‘O.K., I did it. I’m not going to deny that I did it.’ He’s not trying to hide anything he’s done. He’s out in the open.”

Some voters said Mr. Obama’s heritage as the son of a white mother and an African father meant that he was not exactly black, but added that it allowed him to appeal to more people.

“He’s demonstrated that a mixed-race guy with a Muslim name can get far,” said Tony Clayton, 43, as he had his shoes shined at the Metro station at L’Enfant Plaza in Washington. Mr. Clayton was referring to Mr. Obama’s middle name, Hussein.

“He has crossover appeal,” Mr. Clayton said, “and because of that he could win in a general election.”

Others looked to the emotional force that an Obama presidency could wield for African-Americans and dismissed the notion raised by some analysts that his background would make it difficult for American blacks to identify with him.

“The psychological advantage of waking up knowing and seeing almost every day the leader of the free world as a member of your own tribe brings pride even to the most cynical critic,” said Michael Eric Dyson, 49, a professor at Georgetown University and an Obama supporter who has studied racial identity. “Maybe this psychic, internal emotional turmoil that black people struggle against will somehow be lessened by seeing the image of a black man in charge.”

Even amid the joy over the dawning sense that Mr. Obama could indeed become president there were hesitancy and doubt.

“Right now, it’s too good to be true, and I think most of us don’t want to get our hopes up too high,” said Eboni Anthony, 28, manager of Carol’s Daughter, which sells scented candles, soaps and moisturizers across the street from Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. “I think racism is as alive as it was 30 years ago.

“I would love to believe in a fairy tale of having a black president. But I don’t believe the whole United States would agree to it.”

In Harlem, Mr. Washington, a 37-year-old manager of business development for a medical health research company, expressed similar skepticism.

“Listen, I’ve lived in the sticks, so I know how this country is,” said Mr. Washington, who is half Korean and has lived in Mississippi, Oklahoma, Indiana and Virginia. “In the beginning, it was like, ‘I’d love a black dude, especially a black dude like that in the office.’ But I didn’t think it was possible.”

At the Bessemer Flea Market near Birmingham, Jasper V. Hall, 69, said: “I was hoping he didn’t win. I didn’t want him to get shot.”

Mr. Hall, an electrical worker who said he had changed his party affiliation from Republican to support Mr. Obama, added, “Hopefully he can win and stay alive.”

He said he felt Mr. Obama was the candidate who best represented him and understood his struggles.

“You know that ceiling,” Mr. Hall said. “You’re not going to see it flashing back at you, but you know it’s up there. No matter how good, how smart, how much money you have. You’re going to see that ceiling that’s going to reflect and stop you.

“It’s the same ceiling that gets poor people, Hispanic people. It’s the same ceiling. I’m ready for someone to break that ceiling.”

Reporting was contributed by James Barron, Timothy Williams and John Eligon from New York; Lakiesha R. Carr and Holli Chmela from Washington; Rebecca Cathcart from Los Angeles; Brenda Goodman from Birmingham, Ala.; Rachel Mosteller from Houston; Susan Saulny from Chicago; Kirk Semple from Miami; and Katie Zezima from Boston.

Daring to Believe, Blacks Savor Obama Victory, NYT, 5.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/us/politics/05race.html