Yes We Did?: From King's Dream to Obama's Promise

Foreword

xvii Foreword Cynthia Griggs Fleming’s book responds to a need felt by many people today to understand how the previous half-century of civil rights activity transformed the status of African Americans and led to the election of the first African American president. The election of Barack Obama requires a reevaluation of racial progress—an understanding of how Obama’s election fits a pattern of racial change. It is too early to evaluate Barack Obama’s presidential achievements, but Fleming succeeds at identifying the antecedents to his place in history. In what she calls “history combined with social commentary,” Fleming offers the voices of those who lived this history to show how our country has gone “from King to Obama.” These contributions are valuable both to present and future scholars. Fleming identifies martin Luther King Jr.’s life as the watershed in African American advancement, which began with the protests by black people who survived the middle Passage to become slaves in America. Before the Civil War, when the national economy was tethered to slavery, organized resistance to racial oppression was impossible. Even the tenets of Christianity were twisted by those who wished to condone slavery and discrimination on a national level. No genuine progress occurred for African Americans until slavery ended. After the Civil War, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and other black leaders created the first coherent African American strategies for freedom, using long- and short-term relief in the courts, opportunities offered by black institutions of higher learning, and political pressure directed at the federal government to challenge state-sanctioned racial hostility and discrimination. They challenged Jim Crow laws, lynching, and other systemic violence and intimidation in the southern states and elsewhere. The NAACP, whose founding by black and white reformers at the turn of the twentieth century was a defining event in the history of the black struggle, led and often created the new strategies. NAACP xviii Foreword chapters sprang up across the country, releasing the pent-up desire of African Americans to protest their condition. Following the initiation of organized protest by the NAACP, grassroots resistance to segregation took off with the montgomery bus boycott led by Dr. martin Luther King Jr. Thousands of black people boycotted segregated buses and organized alternative means of transportation. Their victory, the first major triumph of the “civil rights revolution,” launched a national movement that subsequently transformed American institutions, culture, and attitudes, and gained enactment of the great civil rights trilogy of laws. Unlike revolutions born from violence, the nonviolent rebellion of African Americans did not repudiate but rather updated and adapted an extraordinary variety of strategies that penetrated every corner of society and made change irresistible. Despite differences in approach, blacks who organized under different banners had energy and determination to topple the steel girders of legalized racism. King and members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were able to openly lead protests in hostile southern territory because black ministers, employed by black congregations, possessed freedoms most African Americans were denied at that time. Students without jobs or property at stake, such as members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were the first blacks in significant numbers to incur daily frontline risks for equality. The NAACP had led black people on matters of protest, policy, and law, such as the decadeslong litigation strategy culminating in Brown v. Board of Education. The movement needed the NAACP’s 1954 school desegregation victory to make “separate but equal” an oxymoron. The National Urban League was created out of the struggles of African Americans who migrated from the South in search of employment during World War I. Over time, the League formed alliances with the progressive business sector, especially through its self-help programs in the in the rapidly changing 1960s. As the civil rights movement reached a zenith, the efforts of these and many mainstream organizations together with a growing base of Americans of every background pulled off the largest protest march ever held in Washington, D.C. With nine other leaders, the labor icon A. Philip Randolph and his lieutenant, Bayard Rustin, organized and produced the first national protest for racial equality. Called the march on Washington, it was as openly debated in 1963 as the election of Barack Obama was in 2008; skeptics predicted that it would be neither peaceful nor successful . The march brought a quarter million blacks and whites to the...