After the Dream: Black and White Southerners since 1965

POSTSCRIPT

POSTSCRIPT The narrative in this book ends in December 2007 and, thus, does not cover the epochal presidential election campaign of 2008 or the unfolding story of Barack Obama’s presidency. Yet nothing is of more significance to its narrative than his triumph. The myriad commentators who saw his accession to power as the fruition of Martin Luther King’s dream were essentially correct. There were many reasons—a collapsing economy , an unpopular war, concern over the country’s polarization, massive demographic change, a president who conspicuously failed to lead when it mattered most—why 2008 was a Democratic year. Nevertheless, the election of the first African American president could not have occurred without the determination to enforce the legislation of 1964 and 1965 and the committed resistance after 1980 to those who sought to dilute its effect. In that sense, Barack Obama, raised far from southern battlegrounds , was, nevertheless, the legatee of the struggles there. This was a point not lost among the citizens of Albany, Georgia, particularly those who could remember the bitter times of the early 1960s. Rutha Mae Harris “chanted softly” a familiar refrain as she drove to the polling place that morning. “I’m going to vote like the spirit say vote,” she sang. I’m going to vote like the spirit say vote, I’m going to vote like the spirit say vote, And if the spirit say vote, I’m going to vote, Oh Lord, I’m going to vote when the spirit say vote. Rutha Mae had learned that song as a twenty-one-year-old student in 1961, “the year Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, half a universe away,” and had sung it at mass meetings in Mount Zion Baptist Church. She had sung it marching to Albany’s city hall as she and her fellow students demanded the right to vote. She had sung it in the city jail, once described by King as “the worst he ever inhabited.” Now, as she and her fellow movement foot soldiers entered the polling booths, “some in wheelchairs, others with canes,” their joy was manifest. “We marched, we sang and now it’s happening,” exulted eighty-year-old Mamie L. Nelson. “It’s really a feeling I cannot describe.” That evening, with all Postscript • 301 the networks declaring Obama the winner, Ms. Harris could not hold back the tears. “The emotions of a lifetime released in a flood.” Jesse Jackson cried, too, for all the world to see as he watched Obama’s victory speech; so did John L. Lewis. Both these national figures, also veterans of the movement, would surely have joined Rutha Mae as she sang “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah.” For them, the connection between the marches, the beatings, the killings, the consequent legislation, its determined enforcement, and Obama’s election was triumphantly clear and direct. “King made the statement that he viewed the Promised Land, won’t get there, but somebody will get there,” declared the Reverend Horace C. Boyd, the pastor of Albany’s Shiloh Baptist Church for more than fifty years, “and that day has dawned.” He was “glad” of it.1 Sunday services throughout the South on November 9 were festive outpourings of thanksgiving. “God has vindicated the black folk,” exalted Pastor Shirley Caesar-Williams in her sermon to her flock in the Raleigh, North Carolina, Mount Calvary Word of Faith Church. “We got a new family coming in. . . . And guess what? They look like us. Amen, amen. They look like us.” The Reverend J. Rayfield Vines Jr., the pastor of Richmond’s Hungary Road Baptist Church and old enough to remember segregation’s indignities, spoke of the past only to give those “who had not tasted the bitterness of segregation . . . an idea of why we all shouted.” Last Tuesday evening, he said, “My cup runneth over. . . . My eyes have seen the glory.” Nowhere “was the weight of history more palpable” than at King’s old church, Ebenezer Baptist. Barack Obama had “stood against the fierce tide of history,” declared the Reverend Raphael G. Warnock, and he had triumphed. King’s surviving sister, Christine King Farris, then reminded the congregation of her brother’s last speech. “As he predicted the night before he left us,” she said, “I may not be with you, but as a people we will reach the promised land.” That, she was convinced, was the meaning of Tuesday’s result. “Yes, it is our promised land,” she shouted, as the congregation...