Dream VS Reality
The principle that all men are created equal has never been more than a remote eventuality in the quest for the presidency. But with the Democratic nomination finally in Barack Obama's grasp, that ideal is no longer relegated to someday.Someday is now.
It is a history-making moment - though Obama is not necessarily the candidate many might have expected to make that history. He is the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas. He's too young to remember the civil rights struggle, let alone to have been a soldier in the fight.
"He was impossible to anticipate," says Shola Lynch, director of a documentary about the 1972 campaign waged by Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the New Yorker who was the first black woman to vie for the presidency.
In a country whose self-identity has been warped by racial prejudice since the beginning, this moment has taken an eternity to arrive. Or, viewed over the spectrum of a long, painful history, relatively little time at all.
After all, it has been just 45 years since Martin Luther King declared his dream for a colorblind America, just over 30 years since Mississippi disbanded the sovereignty commission that fought to maintain segregation and deny blacks their rights.
Other notable black candidates have run for the highest office. Some waged serious campaigns that, at least when it came to the prospect of winning the nomination, were never taken seriously.
"I grew up and matured in the height of the civil rights movement and there was no thought then of a black man being president of the United States. We had barely begun to vote then," says Ronald Walters, who served as deputy director of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's run for the presidency in 1984.
"It was hard for us, even in the Jackson campaign, to get our arms around this, the fact that there would be a black president of the United States - even though we were running," says Walters, now a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland.
But even as they marvel at Obama's rise, Walters and others say it will take time to appraise what it says about the nation's political and cultural state of mind. Can he be elected? How long will it take before other viable black candidates - not to mention women - compete for the presidency?
written by lovens hector
