Under what conditions does important social reform take place in the United
States? Robin Kelley warns us against construing struggles for social justice
primarily in relation to top-down leadership, suggesting that if Barack
Omaba's legacy is to be understood in these terms it will take a mixture of
encouragement and bottom-up pressure from activists. By way of illustration, he observes
the frequent tendency to draw analogies between Obama and Abraham Lincoln. The analogy
is often made in relation to a shared capacity for inspirational leadership:
here are two Moses-like leaders who, seizing the historical moment, have the rare
qualities necessary to lead their people to the Promised Land. Yet, Kelley notes, if we
pay closer attention to the circumstances surrounding slave emancipation, we find that
it was largely African Americans who engineered their own freedom. Lincoln's
role was important, but he had to be forced to
abandon the habitual centrism and risk-aversion of nearly all elected political leaders,
had to be stimulated to listen to the better angels
of his nature. The same, Kelley posits, with his closing analogy between Cornel West and
Frederick Douglass, might be true of Barack Obama.
The model that Kelley adumbrates in relation to the Civil War era is powerfully
reinforced by the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. To the very
limited extent that Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy embraced its goals,
they did so only in response to the “new abolitionists,” i.e. to
the brave black children and their parents who insisted on integrating the Central High
School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957; to James Meredith, who broke the
color line at the University of Mississippi in 1962; to the mass protestors
in Birmingham, Alabama the following year. In each case, strong substantive leadership
was forced on a resistant President by bottom-up social protest. This is not to say that
either President actively supported Jim Crow. But, as with Lincoln and slavery, whatever
doubts they had about segregation were not matters of priority: just as the
sixteenth President would have left the institution of slavery undisturbed had he been
able to secure the future of the Union by other means, Eisenhower and Kennedy would have
much rather avoided the political hassle of sending in federal marshals
(Eisenhower in 1957, Kennedy in 1962), or making a strong moral
statement in favor of racial justice (Kennedy in 1963).
The same might also be said of Lyndon Johnson, although here the analogy with Lincoln
might be stronger, inasmuch as the Texan does appear
to have had a stronger moral commitment to the cause of black freedom than his immediate
predecessors: whereas they had to be forced to play a constructive role, the
role of mass protest in the case of LBJ (as, arguably, with
Lincoln) was to create a political climate in which it made prudent political
sense for the President to act on his moral convictions. And, as with Lincoln, once
Johnson had been liberated to lead, he sometimes displayed an uncommon degree of
commitment to racial justice, as with his commencement address at Howard University in
1965, or his unwavering support for his besieged desegregation chief, Harold Howe, in
the face of enormous pressure for his removal.Footnote 1
How representative are these two black self-reconstructions of the broader dynamics of
progressive politics in the United States? Is it more generally the case that
progress toward social justice comes when pressure from below stimulates action from
above? Does this model work for the two great reform eras of the twentieth
century, namely the New Deal and the Great Society? Are there any instances
of important social progress being achieved independently of either bottom-up pressure
or presidential leadership? And what light do the answers to these questions
shed on the particular character of the current historical moment?
A number of scholars have construed the New Deal in terms of pressure from below. Mostly,
they were either active participants in the African American freedom struggle of the
1960s, or were at least inspired by it: Howard Zinn, Frances Fox Piven and
Richard Cloward. They argue that Franklin Roosevelt's reforms were in
response to substantial working-class protest and alienation at the time of his
inauguration, in March of 1933: violence, marches, spontaneous
demonstrations, labor radicalism.Footnote 2 Other historians of the New Deal, though, are more struck by the weakness of
these pressures – by the listlessness, the overriding sense of despair and
hopelessness, that characterized American political opinion at the dawn of the New Deal.
Americans desperately wanted leadership, these historians find, and that was what they
saw and liked in FDR, but they were not demanding the overthrow of the capitalist
system.Footnote 3
On balance, the evidence decisively supports this second version of events. To the extent
that militancy lay at the heart of the New Deal, it was perhaps anticipated rather than
actual – policy may have been actuated in part by fear of the likely social
consequences of an insufficiently bold response to the Depression. But there is
comparatively little evidence to confirm even this limited version of the
bottom-up-pressure thesis. Rather, FDR seems to have enjoyed quite extraordinary
political latitude in 1933. Certainly, none of his first steps in office seem to reflect
any great threat from below: the Economy Act slashed spending, the Banking
Act rescued the private banking system, the National Industrial Recovery Act rested on
Hoover-era principles of voluntarism, and the agonizingly slow rate at which the Public
Works Administration disbursed funds belies the idea that the administration was
panicked by some radical insurgency.Footnote 4 And if the New Deal came about in response to a rebellion from below, how can
one explain FDR's veto of successive veterans' bonus bills, or the
limitations of the Social Security Act, or the President's determination to
slash spending in 1935 as part of an economically disastrous bid to restore fiscal
discipline?
What of the Great Society? The civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, and
the disestablishment of Jim Crow more generally, came about largely in response to
militant nonviolent protest. Is this also true of LBJ's agenda more
generally, i.e. does it also explain Medicare, federal aid to education, immigration
reform, clean-air and clean-water legislation, and the War on Poverty? In a
very general sense, the answer must be ‘yes’: it was
the African American freedom struggle that more than any other factor gave inspiration
to liberal reformers during the early and mid-1960s, imparting brio and direction to a
progressive agenda that had previously been little more than a vague yearning for
activism. Piven and Cloward, though, go further than this, arguing that the war on
poverty in particular can be understood largely as an attempt to keep the lid on an
acutely threatening social environment.Footnote 5
This thesis works quite well as an explanation for the course of the antipoverty program
after 1964: the Office of Economic Opportunity's support for
radical community action, and Richard Nixon's subsequent support for a
guaranteed income, need to be understood in relation to the ghetto militancy that became
such a frightening feature of American political life after the Watts riot of 1965.Footnote 6 But the lineaments of this massive explosion of militancy and activism could not
be clearly espied by the architects of the Great Society in 1963–4, for their
efforts preceded the first of the long hot summers. Instead, the Great Society was
conveived in an environment in which mass violence was associated narrowly with white
southern resistance to African American freedom.Footnote 7 When the Kennedy administration started, in a desultory way, to turn its
attention to the poor, and when Johnson converted these beginnings into a
“war” on poverty, they were under no particular exogenous
pressure. If anything, it was the very absence of such pressure that gave LBJ the
welcome opportunity to seize the issue and make it his own. In a generally compliant
political environment – the economy was growing at 6 percent a year,
unemployment was less than 4 percent, Americans trusted their government –
Johnson sought to burnish the New Deal aspect of his complex political personality,
hoping to allay the skepticism that Kennedy liberals felt about the coarse Texan. Also
relevant in explaining the war on poverty is the remarkable self-confidence and
political power that intellectuals possessed at this time: rather than being
a bottom-up phenomenon, the program was imbued with the strong view among contemporary
experts of the existence of a “knowledge revolution” that made
almost any problem solvable (we will return to this theme at the end of the
essay).
While social reform can originate with bottom-up social protest, in other words, this is
not a necessary condition. Sometimes – rarely, perhaps, but with portentous
consequences – liberal Presidents enjoy considerable political autonomy, and
it is that freedom, rather than exogenous pressure, that allows them to pursue ambitious
reform agendas. But it is immediately necessary to complicate that rather simple
statement by introducing the work of those political sociologists who find a degree of
autonomy to be a frequent characteristic of the American state more generally.Footnote 8 The state, they argue, has its own interests, and if one is to understand public
policy it is important to wrestle with the institutional self-interest and personal
policy preferences not just of Presidents but of judges, bureaucrats, and Congressional
staffers. In American political democracy, for all its populism, significant power is
wielded by unelected officials: they enjoy substantial discretion in the
priority that they attach to particular issues and in interpreting legislative or
constitutional language, and they frequently interact with one another in
“iron-triangle” relationships that are little observed by
journalists or elected politicians, yet can have a considerable impact on public policy.
According to this version of American politics, it might be possible for progressive
social reform to happen independently of either bottom-up pressure or presidential
leadership, provided that a desire to promote social justice exists within this
permanent government. Such a contingency might be thought to be a remote one, but the
years of the Nixon–Ford presidency (1969–77)
provide an interesting illustration of reform emerging in this way.Footnote 9 Nixon's election embodied a strong reaction against the
“excesses” of Great Society liberalism, and a desire to break with
what he disdained as “Washington paternalism.” Yet the
public-policy legacy of these years is far more progressive than that of any subsequent
presidency, Democrat or Republican. Among these legacies are affirmative action, the
desegregation of southern schools, bilingual education, the suspension of capital
punishment, abortion rights, the Environmental Protection Agency, new civil rights
protections for the disabled and the aged, the prohibition of gender discrimination in
educational institutions, and a bar on job tests that have a “disparate
impact” on ethno-racial minorities.
What is the explanation for this progressive legacy? Some historians have
argued that Nixon was a more liberal President than one might think from his rhetoric or
his electoral tactics, or that he selectively adopted liberal policies to advance his
ambition to construct a new Republican majority from the ashes of the Great
Society.Footnote 10 Alternatively, one could posit that these were years when the world of civil
rights mass action broadened to encompass causes such as the rights of gays, the aged,
Chicanos, American Indians, women, and children. Such explanations clearly have some
merit. To a surprising degree, though, the breakthroughs listed in the previous
paragraph were achieved in less conspicuous ways: through the executive
branch, with relatively little presidential involvement; from Congress, with
relatively little input from elected legislators; and from judges responding
not to public opinion, or to broad forces of social protest, or to elected officials,
but rather to little-known court-oriented public-interest groups such as the Center for
Law and Social Progress (CLASP).
In each case, the impetus for reform came from educated elites: graduates of
the nation's top law schools, especially Yale, eschewing careers in corporate
America in favor of public-interest law or government service; high-level
career officials and political appointees in Great Society-oriented agencies such as the
Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, the Labor Department's
Office of Federal Contract Compliance, the free-standing Equal Employment Opportunities
Commission, the Office for Civil Rights at Health Education and Welfare, and the
Environmental Protection Agency. It is impossible to detach their drive, idealism and
ambition from the African American freedom struggle, which clearly ignited in this
remarkable cohort of beltway activists a passionate commitment to social justice. More
interesting in the context of the present paper, however, is the fact that American
democracy gave them so many avenues for pursuing an activist social agenda even after
the era of mass protest epitomized by the Birmingham campaign of 1963 or the Columbia
University antiwar protest of 1968 had come to an end, and even after Lyndon Johnson had
given way to the bête noire of American
liberalism, Richard Nixon.
That this should be the case reflects a mixture of broad and historically specific
features of American politics. Thinking broadly, the dispersal of power between and
within three separate branches of government, and between the federal government and the
states, can be immensely frustrating for reformers, making it hard to achieve the kind
of political power that can be achieved in a parliamentary system simply by winning a
decisive legislative majority at election time. On the other hand, it also gives them
far more points of access to political power, sometimes allowing them to make progress
in seemingly unpropitious political times such as the early 1970s.
As for historically specific considerations, the key development was what political
scientists call ‘regulatory federalism’.Footnote 11 The process begins with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbade
discrimination on grounds of race, ethnicity or religion by any institution receiving
federal funds. Unexpectedly, Title VI soon became an instrument of active social policy,
used by the Johnson Administration as the central element in its effort to eliminate Jim
Crow schools. That represented a major departure: previously, federal
regulations had never had such far-reaching implications, but rather had been designed
to secure such mundane objectives as statewide uniformity in programs receiving federal
matching funds, or competent state administration.
After 1964, and with particular vigor after 1968, Title VI became a template, copied by
administrators, public-interest groups and legislative staffers seeking to use the
increasing financial clout of the Great Society federal state to impose progressive
public policy on subnational governments and private corporations. In the case of
bilingual education, the director of Richard Nixon's Office for Civil Rights
determined in 1970 that Title VI entitled “language minorities” to
schooling in their own language. In the case of gender discrimination in education
institutions, Congressional staffers duplicated the language of Title VI in the
Education Amendments of 1972 (as Title IX). And with disability
rights, it was Congressional staffers – again – who added Title VI
wording to the Rehabilitation Amendments of 1973. In not one of these three cases was
there substantial discussion either in the media or among elected politicians, yet all
three of these innovations would have transformative effects.Footnote 12 In other cases – EPA, OSHA – elected officials were much
more directly involved in shaping public policy, but the key statutes still left federal
civil servants with considerable administrative discretion.
How can these three very different reforming moments help us to understand the politics
of social reform during the first five hundred days of the Obama
administration? None of the evidence presented here is inconsistent with
Kelley's central claim, namely that the forty-fourth President is likely to
remain hesitant about leading the kind of principled crusade for social justice for
which many of his warmest supporters yearn, absent substantial activist pressure.
Rather, the three reform moments that have been briefly introduced in this paper help to
explain why this should be so. First, compared to FDR and LBJ, President Obama enjoys
slender partisan majorities on Capitol Hill. History teaches us that this need not be an
overwhelming obstacle: during the Nixon–Ford administration,
substantial reforms were achieved in an era of divided government; and
Roosevelt and Johnson won substantial support from progressive Republicans. At the
beginning of the twenty-first century, though, the two main political parties are
probably more ideologically homogeneous, and more distant from one another, than at
almost any point in American history: liberal Republicanism is essentially
defunct, and there are far fewer conservative Democrats than before. Obama has striven
throughout his brief career in national politics to project civility and reconciliation
in an unusually febrile political climate: at the 2004 Democratic convention,
he claimed to see not red states and blue states, but rather the United States of
America, and as President he has worked very hard to win the support and trust of at
least some Republicans (through his cabinet nominations, for example, and in
lobbying for health care reform and his economic recovery package). But he
has not enjoyed much success, and certainly nothing to compare with the cooperation that
marked Lyndon Johnson's relationships with President Dwight Eisenhower during
the 1950s (when LBJ was Democratic leader in the Senate), or with
Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen (whose support for the 1964
Civil Rights Bill was crucial when LBJ was president).
Another contrast concerns declining faith in government. One consequence of the New Deal,
argue historians such as David Kennedy, was to institute a new confidence among the
American people in the beneficence of the federal government: programs such
as rural electrification, social security, and the minimum wage created new connections
between the American people and Washington that outlasted the Great Depression. As for
Johnson, he came into politics as a committed New Dealer: as a young
congressman, he brought electricity to the Hill Country west of Austin, where he had
grown up. And by the time he was President, popular faith in the efficacy of government
was at its zenith: polled by Gallup in 1964, 74 percent of Americans
disclosed that they trusted their government to do the right thing all or nearly all of
the time.
That faith was an essential precondition for the ambitious Great Society vision that LBJ
promulgated in May of that year. At least as important, though, was another form of
faith, namely faith within American governmental elites in the power of experts to solve
complex social problems. This owed much to the success of Keynesian economics, much too
to the advent of the computer, and much finally to the nation's recent
scientific accomplishments, for example in the space race, and with the Salk vaccine for
polio. This, in sum, was the era of what contemporaries termed the “knowledge
revolution.” Supporting the war on poverty in 1964, Senator Hubert Humphrey
celebrated the intoxicating new “discovery” that any problem, once
identified, had a solution. And to the labor department's Daniel Patrick
Moynihan it seemed in 1965 that defeating poverty would be easy:
“the prospect that the more primitive social issues of American politics are
at last to be resolved need only mean that we now turn to issues more demanding of human
ingenuity.”Footnote 13 Such hubris arguably lay at the heart of many of the governmental crusades of
the 1960s, including Kennedy's promise to send a man to the Moon by 1969,
Robert McNamara's belief that Defense Department computers could defeat
communism in Vietnam, and the bold, unfulfilled vision of racial justice that LBJ
outlined at Howard University.
Intoxicating confidence among elites in their power to solve complex problems is not a
marked feature among governmental elites since the
1960s, and neither is popular faith in government. The decline in both such forms of
faith has fueled conservative antigovernment crusades ever since, as when Ronald Reagan
famously declared that “government is not the solution to our
problems; government is the problem.”Footnote 14 But it has also been embraced by the Democratic Presidents of the post-Great
Society era: by Jimmy Carter, in his “malaise” speech
(“government cannot solve our problems … It cannot
eliminate poverty, or provide a bountiful economy, or reduce
inflation”); by Bill Clinton, when he remarked that
“the era of big government is over”; and by Barack
Obama, when he lectured black audiences that parental responsibility and taking
education seriously were key to African American uplift.Footnote 15
On important occasions in American history, progress toward social justice has been made
when bottom-up social forces compelled a risk-averse political establishment to grasp a
political nettle that it would far rather have avoided. So totemic is the greatest
example of this tendency, the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s,
that it is tempting to view all struggles for justice in the United States through its
prism. To an important degree, this is what is happening when historians such as Eric
Foner, Ira Berlin and Steven Hahn tell the story of emancipation and reconstruction as
one of black self-liberation. And, to a probably larger extent, this is also what is
happening when New Left historians see the New Deal or the American Revolution as
responses to bottom-up pressure.Footnote 16
Of the historical moments just referred to, the first – the era of
emancipation, on which Kelley focused – seems by far the most analogous to
the civil rights movement. The other three historical moments referred to in this essay
– the New Deal, the Great Society era, and the Nixon–Ford
Presidency – serve to illustrate the need to be cautious in assuming that
social reform always takes place when social protest forces a President to act
(not that Kelley makes any such assertion). They teach us first of
all that presidential leadership can exist independently of bottom-up social forces, as
during the New Deal. They teach us secondly that the link between social protest and
federal leadership can sometimes be powerful but also indirect (as with the
war on poverty). And the Nixon–Ford years remind us that
presidential leadership and federal leadership cannot be taken to be
synonymous: students of the politics of social policy must be prepared to
wrestle with the Madisonian structures of American politics in all their complexity,
unappetizing a prospect as that might sometimes seem to be.
I have known Robin Kelley for a long time. I was on the committee of the Organization
of American Historians that awarded a prize to Robin for his first book, Hammer and Hoe,Footnote 17 which has had enormous influence both in content and in methodology. I trust
this award and early recognition of his merit played a part in setting Professor
Kelley on the course leading to his selection as the distinguished Harmsworth
Professor. May I also add that there are still barriers to overcome. Neither the
Harmsworth nor the Pitt Professorships have ever been occupied by an African
American woman, though there are many outstanding historians who could be selected.
Since July 2009, I have been living with my wife, Nancy Hewitt, in the same house in
which John and Aurelia Franklin resided while he was Pitt Professor at Cambridge in
1962–3. Nancy is the current Pitt Professor, and although she is not the
first female Pitt Professor, she is only one of three who have held the post since
1945. I don't know what Oxford's record is along these lines
and I don't want to offend my hosts, but my guess is that, as with
Cambridge, there is much room for improvement.
Like Robin I was greatly influenced by John Hope Franklin, about whom I would like to
say a few words. As an undergraduate in the 1960s, I read Reconstruction after the Civil War.Footnote 18 It taught me that history was really a matter of interpretation and not just
a collection of facts and that the writing of history depended on context. I also
learned, admittedly for the first time, that African Americans were agents of their
own history and not merely victims. Franklin's Reconstruction also emphasized another point, which I think has
become deemphasized in the writing of history since I left graduate school in the
early 1970s: that is, national institutions – legal,
political, and economic, have enormous power to shape and retard social and
political change.
The last book I edited and published in 2008, One America in
the 21st Century: the Report of President Bill Clinton's
Initiative on Race,Footnote 19 dealt with the federal commission that Professor Franklin chaired in the
late 1990s. He also wrote the preface to this volume shortly before his death, a
collaboration that I will always cherish.
In his life and career John Hope Franklin demonstrated the intersection of the
historian with the making of public policy. He contributed to the historical
research for Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and he marched in Selma, Alabama for
black freedom in 1965. He also had the ear of Presidents, particularly William
Jefferson Clinton. John Hope spoke out against the persistence of racism
– as Professor Kelley notes he did not accept the notion of a
“postracial society” – but he also had faith that
the federal government could bridge racial divides, and through dialogue erase some
of the racial animosity, that block progress. Of course, he knew that grassroots
conversations were not enough and that it would take passage of federal laws and
their enforcement to create a just and more egalitarian society. To this end, the
committee he chaired under President Clinton called for the elimination of racial
profiling by the police, extension of health care to the uninsured, and the
continuation of affirmative-action programs to provide educational and employment
opportunities. Near the end of his life, John Hope became disappointed with
President Clinton. Once a devoted Friend of Bill, Professor Franklin came to
reevaluate Clinton following several remarks the former President made demeaning
Barack Obama during the Democratic primary in which he opposed Hillary Clinton.
Professor Franklin wondered just how much President Clinton had really been
committed to implementing the racial initiative that John Hope had overseen.
As Professor Kelley cogently points out in his Harmsworth Lecture, race still matters
very much in the US. I agree completely with his observation that President Obama
does little good in attributing racism to “personal attitudes”
rather than to the institutional and systemic barriers that continue to work against
people of color. Failure to recognize this, and Obama is hardly alone, is a major
problem. Color-blind universalism in combination with economic growth has been
promoted before by Presidents including Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John
Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. The question now is whether the gains of
the civil rights movement have finally created the foundation upon which policies of
color-blind universalism, including universal health care, can result in genuine
uplift for the poor and excluded of all races.
Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans suggest that the US has not reached that point. In
spite of the initial outrage at the Bush administration's handling of
rescue and recovery operations following the catastrophe and the media spotlight on
the widespread poverty and institutional racism that left black New Orleanians most
vulnerable to the disaster, the city is not being rebuilt in a way that, as Robin
prescribes, would create a new, compassionate community.
I understand Professor Kelley's dismay with the rush by scholars and the
media to compare Presidents Lincoln and Obama, which, he laments, only reinforces
the great-man version of history. At the same time, historians and journalists also
have compared Obama nearly as much to another President, Franklin Roosevelt, who set
the first hundred day's yardstick by which all his successors have been
judged, nearly all unfavorably.Footnote 20 One obvious source for comparison is the great recession facing Obama.
Though not as severe as the Great Depression that Roosevelt encountered,
FDR's handling of it might provide useful lessons, both successes and
mistakes, for the current President, examples that he does not seem to have
embraced. Which just goes to show how self-selective and often inscrutable are the
lessons of history.
I agree with Professor Kelley about the shortcomings of the great-person
(which should apply to both men and women) theory of history,
but not entirely for the same reasons. In evaluating Obama – or any
President, for that matter – I think it very important for historians to
underscore what rarely gets mentioned, and that is the presence of institutional
barriers to change. Obama, as other Presidents before him, confronts a Congress that
mirrors the preferences of those voters going to the polls, which usually
constitutes a relatively small number of those eligible to cast ballots. The
membership of the House of Representatives reflects partisan apportionment schemes
that protect incumbency and reinforce existing divisions. Furthermore, there exists
a two-party system in the legislature that is highly polarized, and although
Congress contains a majority of the president's Democratic Party, looks
are deceiving. The balance of power among Democratic lawmakers resides in a small
group of conservatives – now called centrists. At the same time, Obama
has inherited a conservative Supreme Court that also places constraints on what he
may accomplish or even seek to accomplish. So-called great men can only make so much
history or as much as powerful, established institutions permit them. Political,
legal, and institutional context matters.
How, then, does progressive change happen in the US? Professor Kelley
answers that it comes through social movements. I agree that it does, but not
without qualification. Change comes in tandem between social movements and capable
leaders, call them something other than great people, but they are as important as
they are necessary. Often they are Presidents. Like fire and air, social movements
and national political leaders need each other to burn through the timbers of
resistance.
Social movements, however, can go only so far. In an earlier version of the lecture,
which I don't think was delivered, Professor Kelley discussed Jesse
Jackson's run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in the
mid-1980s. This, by the way, is one means of linking Barack Obama and his rise to
the White House to the heritage of the civil rights movement. Jackson, himself a
veteran of the movement, campaigned on its legacy. Though he tried to transcend
strict racialist appeals through his Rainbow Coalition, he went down to defeat,
especially in 1988, despite support from local grassroots organizations scattered
around the nation. The basis of his support came mainly from black voters and he
only captured 10 percent of white primary votes.
Obama learned some valuable political lessons, which we probably need to acknowledge
more in our role as historians than as public intellectuals and political activists.
Clearly Obama was identified as an African American no matter his biracial and
foreign origins, but he had to run not so much as a black man, but as the
well-educated, extremely smart, and articulate person he is. Having a beautiful wife
and two adorable children didn't hurt. And given that his African roots
only went back one generation and not ten and that his father was a Muslim,
candidate Obama had to prove that he is an American. In fact, Obama is part of a
post-civil rights (not postracial) generation of successful
and ambitious black politicians, including Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, Corey
Booker of Newark, and Artur Davis of Birmingham, seeking to run in majority
non-black municipal, state and national arenas.Footnote 21 As a matter of strategy if not predisposition, such politicians have to
defuse their racialist messages and adopt universalist language. Look at
Obama's Jeremiah Wright problem that erupted during the primaries and
furnishes a cautionary tale for the new generation of black politicians. In
Obama's eloquent Philadelphia address on 18 March 2008, he tackled the
issue of race, albeit reluctantly, and defused it to a considerable extent. He
showed the kind of balancing skills which are his hallmark. Acknowledging the
continued existence of racism, which black liberation ministers like Wright railed
against, nevertheless he expressed a racial optimism generated by the advances the
civil rights movement had made toward achieving a “more perfect
Union.”Footnote 22 The crisis behind him, Obama has not addressed the delicate matter of race
again.
Finally, I agree with Robin's praise of the grassroots activists that made
the civil rights movement possible: Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Bob
Moses, to name just a few. But why haven't their successors
(and in Moses's case he still is working for change through
his Algebra Project) engineered a nationwide or even regional social
movement that is powerful enough to initiate and sustain the next phase toward
economic and political transformation? I do not think it is merely a
matter of the media shaping the news in a way that stifles change and distorts or
ignores the activists working for it. Here again, I think context matters in
explaining why Obama will probably not live up to the expectations of supporters
like Professor Kelley and me. (I would parenthetically add that I detect
in Robin an ironic wish that perhaps Barack Obama would become the great man he
argues against embracing.) Great leaders, together with social movements,
can make enormous change, but they do not exist in a historical vacuum. Abolitionism
and civil war shaped Lincoln; labor unions and depression galvanized
Franklin Roosevelt; the civil rights movement and the Cold War propelled
(but also felled) Lyndon Johnson. So far the great recession
does not appear critical enough to shake up political alignments and propel great
change. President Obama also lacks the powerful, nationwide social movement that he
needs behind him, and although he has been in office less than a year, time is
running out to provide it.Footnote 23 Unless the context suddenly changes, Barack Obama may be the first and last
African American President of the United States.
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where
all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our
founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of
our democracy, tonight is your answer.
Obama, opening words of acceptance speech in Chicago, 4 November
2008.By quoting Harold Holzer: “Obama's
victory serves to help … America fulfill its dream of equal opportunity
regardless of race,” Kelley reminds us of the understandable American
hoopla concerning the wider implications of Obama's victory. For Holzer
and others (including, temporarily, a majority of African American
respondents to polling on the question), that victory proved that America
had taken a giant step away from the racial divisions that darkened its history,
taking instead a step towards a postracial society.Footnote 24 The briefest of glances at previous black firsts, however, shows the
absurdity of such a presumption. Henry Flipper, for example, graduated from West
Point shortly before the nadir of white supremacy in the Army, nearly a century
before full military integration. Obama tapped into this promise of a postracial
society, not least at the outset of his victory speech in Chicago where he justified
his (mandatory presidential) invocation of American
exceptionalism by hailing his own election. Yet one suspects that his private views
were less prone to hubris, certainly if his previous comments about being the first
black president of the Harvard Law Review were
anything to go by. In his autobiography, he attributed the “burst of
publicity” surrounding his “black first” at the
Review to “America's
hunger for any optimistic sign from the racial front – a morsel of proof
that, after all, some progress has been made.”Footnote 25
In fact, a closer look at the discourse anticipating a first black President also
reveals more than a “morsel of proof” of negative signs on the
racial front – negative signs that were reminiscent of the equivocal
responses to black firsts throughout American history. In the first place, praise
for the skills of black firsts has often served to pigeonhole black ability,
particularly by setting black creative genius against white common sense. Take, for
example, the breakthrough of black entertainers into respectable mainstream culture
during the World War II era (a contrast to the association of Harlem
Renaissance-era artists and sportsmen with low culture and sexual
deviance). In 1941, leading sports writer Dean Cromwell praised the black
man's “ability to sprint and jump” but attributed
it to the fact it would have been “a life-and-death matter to him in the
jungle.”Footnote 26 Duke Ellington, leader of the first all-black band to play at Carnegie Hall,
grew frustrated at the praise he received as a musician, complaining,
“The Negro is not merely a singing and dancing wizard.”Footnote 27 Hillary Clinton updated the genre at the height of the campaign when she
argued, “Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President
Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it
done.” Pointing to her record, Clinton vehemently denied that her praise
for Obama's inspirational rhetorical skills and Johnson's
hard-nosed executive skills were racially coded assertions about black speechmaking
and white leadership. But black radio show hosts through to mainstream newspapers
played up the story nonetheless. In a lead editorial, the New York Times condemned Clinton for “the distasteful
implication that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect
change.”Footnote 28
Furthermore, discussions of black firsts and high achievers in the past have also
served to underscore racial stereotypes precisely because they portrayed such folk
as exceptional individuals rather than as representatives of the race. Joe Louis,
the first black heavyweight champion to win a white following, won that following
through his studiously respectable lifestyle and his patriotism. But the fact that
his lifestyle was remarked upon for being respectable made a broader, negative,
racial point. One New York Times sports reporter
considered the question of Louis's
Color? Only in the tint of his skin. He doesn't drink
or smoke. He doesn't turn racing cars upside-down. He
doesn't sing or whistle or imitate four Hawaiians. He never has
been sued for breach of promise. He puts his money in the bank. These are
very sober qualities. All his striking qualities are in his two fists.Footnote 29
The same process of damning the race by praising the exception
reappeared in a gaffe made, somewhat characteristically, by Joe Biden early in the
campaign (quite an irony, given Biden's later relationship
with Obama). “I mean, you got the first mainstream
African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking
guy,” Biden told a reporter. “I mean, that's a
storybook, man.” As with Clinton, Biden was quick to deny the charge of
racism – in particular, explaining that “clean as a whistle,
sharp as a tack” was an expression his mother used to convey praise,
rather than any allusions to drug taking.Footnote 30 But again, the damage was done (not just in terms of racial
discourse, but to Biden's campaign). Obama sought to reverse
the logic of individual black success implying generalized black failures during his
set-piece speech later in the campaign. After summarizing the impact of past
discrimination, Obama concluded, “What's remarkable is how
many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way
out of no way.” As for the “many who didn't make
it” they “were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by
discrimination.”Footnote 31
Since the rise of Affirmative Action, black firsts have also suffered a further
charge – that they gained their success because of their colour rather
than earning it in their own right (let alone earning it despite their
colour). During the election campaign, it was a charge levelled with some
emotion by Geraldine Ferraro, the former Democratic vice presidential nominee, and
an active Clinton supporter. “If Obama was a white man, he would not be
in this position,” Ferraro told a reporter. “And if he was a
woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He
happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the
concept.”Footnote 32 Ferraro did not take back the quote. Clinton distanced herself from the
sentiment but she regularly complained that the media were in thrall to Obama. For
his part, Obama condemned “the implication that my candidacy is somehow
an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on
the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the
cheap.”Footnote 33 (In the brouhaha about race an important point was overlooked
– that the latest black first, like so many before, would be by a man
rather than a woman).
The performance of Obama as the first black President has the potential to influence
discussion about race even more than his performance during the campaign. As African
American comedienne Wanda Sykes put it at the first White House
correspondents' dinner of his presidency. “I'm
proud to be able to say the ‘first black President’
– that's unless you screw up and then it's going to
be, “What's up with the half white guy?
… who voted for that mulatto?”Footnote 34 In fact, at first blush, the conduct of Michelle Obama, the first black
First Lady, may have at least as important an influence on race stereotypes. Writing
in the Nation, prominent black feminist scholar
Patricia Hill Collins thought Michelle Obama provided an answer to
Collins's long-standing question,
“[where] is a picture of black femininity
(in particular, that of darker-skinned, nontragic femininity)
that might signify beauty, chic, elegance, vulnerability,
sophistication?”Footnote 35 (In the most recent polls, though, a majority of African American
respondents who offered an opinion thought the conduct of the Obamas would make
little if any difference to racial attitudes.)Footnote 36
Even on the narrow question of what Obama's victory might mean for the
possibilities of a postracial electoral politics, a glance at the past reminds us
that although a good number of black firsts turned out to be the “first
of many,” there were also plenty that turned out to be the
“first and last,” or at least, the “first of
disproportionately few.” We need look no further than John Hope
Franklin's time at Cambridge for one such “first and
last” (so far), or to Obama's presidency
of the Harvard Law Review for a “first
of disproportionately few,” with one African American president in the
twenty years since his tenure. Hiram Revels was succeeded by a black senator, but
the next one followed more than eighty years later, and in the modern era only
Massachusetts and Illinois have sent a black senator to Washington.
Thus breaching racial barriers has not always been the same as clearing them away for
others (and in the case of Booker T. Washington, the white segregationist
backlash over his dinner at the White House meant the barriers to a black man
lobbying the President went up further). Moreover, even when a black
first proved to be the “first of many,” it did not always
represent a positive change in racial attitudes. In Jackie Robinson's
case it did – and his impressive debut in Major League emboldened team
owners to sign up the best talent from the Negro leagues. But Carl
Stokes's election as mayor proved to be the “first of
many” because of the changing demographics of urban politics rather than
changing attitudes – indeed, the first black mayors assumed office at the
height of the urban crisis, leading to an association between black office-holding
and urban decay.
Whether Obama's victory proves to be the first of many, the first of a
few, or the first and last, only time will tell. Intriguingly, Republicans chose an
African American chairman, Michael Steele, soon after the election, and an Indian
American, Governor Bobby Jindal, to respond to Obama's first State of the
Union address. But the fact that Obama gained as many white voters as John Kerry had
four years previously does not, in itself, portend postracial elections in the
future. Polls did not, and could not, explore the question why white voters were
content to vote for this particular black candidate, and how they might respond to
black candidates more generally. What is clear is that unlike Stokes's
election, Obama's victory seems much more of an outlier in terms of
recent state-wide voting patterns. Indeed, like many previous black firsts,
Obama's victory was startling precisely because his chosen field was
still predominantly a white man's game. He was the only nonwhite
candidate for either party (just as Clinton was the only female
candidate). Nearly half a century after the Voting Rights Act, when Obama
moved from Congress to the White House, he left behind a lily-white Senate.
The broader camouflage question – when a black first is misused as
evidence of an egalitarian society – has also recurred through history.
Or, to put it more bluntly, if one person could make it, then the reason others
didn't was their fault, not the fault of the system. For example, Booker
T. Washington's success through hard work and avoidance of controversy
undermined early NAACP calls for federal intervention in the South. As Kelley points
out, in Obama's day, “conservatives and many liberals have
read [his] election as marking the end of racism. This has had
a chilling effect on public discussions or acknowledgement of contemporary
racism.” No doubt Obama chafed against such assertions. When elected to
the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, Obama
had told reporters, “it's important that stories like mine
aren't used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks.”Footnote 37
You have
Access
Under what conditions does important social reform take place in the United States? Robin Kelley warns us against construing struggles for social justice primarily in relation to top-down leadership, suggesting that if Barack Omaba's legacy is to be understood in these terms it will take a mixture of encouragement and bottom-up pressure from activists. By way of illustration, he observes the frequent tendency to draw analogies between Obama and Abraham Lincoln. The analogy is often made in relation to a shared capacity for inspirational leadership: here are two Moses-like leaders who, seizing the historical moment, have the rare qualities necessary to lead their people to the Promised Land. Yet, Kelley notes, if we pay closer attention to the circumstances surrounding slave emancipation, we find that it was largely African Americans who engineered their own freedom. Lincoln's role was important, but he had to be forced to abandon the habitual centrism and risk-aversion of nearly all elected political leaders, had to be stimulated to listen to the better angels of his nature. The same, Kelley posits, with his closing analogy between Cornel West and Frederick Douglass, might be true of Barack Obama.
The model that Kelley adumbrates in relation to the Civil War era is powerfully reinforced by the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. To the very limited extent that Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy embraced its goals, they did so only in response to the “new abolitionists,” i.e. to the brave black children and their parents who insisted on integrating the Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957; to James Meredith, who broke the color line at the University of Mississippi in 1962; to the mass protestors in Birmingham, Alabama the following year. In each case, strong substantive leadership was forced on a resistant President by bottom-up social protest. This is not to say that either President actively supported Jim Crow. But, as with Lincoln and slavery, whatever doubts they had about segregation were not matters of priority: just as the sixteenth President would have left the institution of slavery undisturbed had he been able to secure the future of the Union by other means, Eisenhower and Kennedy would have much rather avoided the political hassle of sending in federal marshals (Eisenhower in 1957, Kennedy in 1962), or making a strong moral statement in favor of racial justice (Kennedy in 1963).
The same might also be said of Lyndon Johnson, although here the analogy with Lincoln might be stronger, inasmuch as the Texan does appear to have had a stronger moral commitment to the cause of black freedom than his immediate predecessors: whereas they had to be forced to play a constructive role, the role of mass protest in the case of LBJ (as, arguably, with Lincoln) was to create a political climate in which it made prudent political sense for the President to act on his moral convictions. And, as with Lincoln, once Johnson had been liberated to lead, he sometimes displayed an uncommon degree of commitment to racial justice, as with his commencement address at Howard University in 1965, or his unwavering support for his besieged desegregation chief, Harold Howe, in the face of enormous pressure for his removal.Footnote 1
How representative are these two black self-reconstructions of the broader dynamics of progressive politics in the United States? Is it more generally the case that progress toward social justice comes when pressure from below stimulates action from above? Does this model work for the two great reform eras of the twentieth century, namely the New Deal and the Great Society? Are there any instances of important social progress being achieved independently of either bottom-up pressure or presidential leadership? And what light do the answers to these questions shed on the particular character of the current historical moment?
A number of scholars have construed the New Deal in terms of pressure from below. Mostly, they were either active participants in the African American freedom struggle of the 1960s, or were at least inspired by it: Howard Zinn, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. They argue that Franklin Roosevelt's reforms were in response to substantial working-class protest and alienation at the time of his inauguration, in March of 1933: violence, marches, spontaneous demonstrations, labor radicalism.Footnote 2 Other historians of the New Deal, though, are more struck by the weakness of these pressures – by the listlessness, the overriding sense of despair and hopelessness, that characterized American political opinion at the dawn of the New Deal. Americans desperately wanted leadership, these historians find, and that was what they saw and liked in FDR, but they were not demanding the overthrow of the capitalist system.Footnote 3
On balance, the evidence decisively supports this second version of events. To the extent that militancy lay at the heart of the New Deal, it was perhaps anticipated rather than actual – policy may have been actuated in part by fear of the likely social consequences of an insufficiently bold response to the Depression. But there is comparatively little evidence to confirm even this limited version of the bottom-up-pressure thesis. Rather, FDR seems to have enjoyed quite extraordinary political latitude in 1933. Certainly, none of his first steps in office seem to reflect any great threat from below: the Economy Act slashed spending, the Banking Act rescued the private banking system, the National Industrial Recovery Act rested on Hoover-era principles of voluntarism, and the agonizingly slow rate at which the Public Works Administration disbursed funds belies the idea that the administration was panicked by some radical insurgency.Footnote 4 And if the New Deal came about in response to a rebellion from below, how can one explain FDR's veto of successive veterans' bonus bills, or the limitations of the Social Security Act, or the President's determination to slash spending in 1935 as part of an economically disastrous bid to restore fiscal discipline?
What of the Great Society? The civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, and the disestablishment of Jim Crow more generally, came about largely in response to militant nonviolent protest. Is this also true of LBJ's agenda more generally, i.e. does it also explain Medicare, federal aid to education, immigration reform, clean-air and clean-water legislation, and the War on Poverty? In a very general sense, the answer must be ‘yes’: it was the African American freedom struggle that more than any other factor gave inspiration to liberal reformers during the early and mid-1960s, imparting brio and direction to a progressive agenda that had previously been little more than a vague yearning for activism. Piven and Cloward, though, go further than this, arguing that the war on poverty in particular can be understood largely as an attempt to keep the lid on an acutely threatening social environment.Footnote 5
This thesis works quite well as an explanation for the course of the antipoverty program after 1964: the Office of Economic Opportunity's support for radical community action, and Richard Nixon's subsequent support for a guaranteed income, need to be understood in relation to the ghetto militancy that became such a frightening feature of American political life after the Watts riot of 1965.Footnote 6 But the lineaments of this massive explosion of militancy and activism could not be clearly espied by the architects of the Great Society in 1963–4, for their efforts preceded the first of the long hot summers. Instead, the Great Society was conveived in an environment in which mass violence was associated narrowly with white southern resistance to African American freedom.Footnote 7 When the Kennedy administration started, in a desultory way, to turn its attention to the poor, and when Johnson converted these beginnings into a “war” on poverty, they were under no particular exogenous pressure. If anything, it was the very absence of such pressure that gave LBJ the welcome opportunity to seize the issue and make it his own. In a generally compliant political environment – the economy was growing at 6 percent a year, unemployment was less than 4 percent, Americans trusted their government – Johnson sought to burnish the New Deal aspect of his complex political personality, hoping to allay the skepticism that Kennedy liberals felt about the coarse Texan. Also relevant in explaining the war on poverty is the remarkable self-confidence and political power that intellectuals possessed at this time: rather than being a bottom-up phenomenon, the program was imbued with the strong view among contemporary experts of the existence of a “knowledge revolution” that made almost any problem solvable (we will return to this theme at the end of the essay).
While social reform can originate with bottom-up social protest, in other words, this is not a necessary condition. Sometimes – rarely, perhaps, but with portentous consequences – liberal Presidents enjoy considerable political autonomy, and it is that freedom, rather than exogenous pressure, that allows them to pursue ambitious reform agendas. But it is immediately necessary to complicate that rather simple statement by introducing the work of those political sociologists who find a degree of autonomy to be a frequent characteristic of the American state more generally.Footnote 8 The state, they argue, has its own interests, and if one is to understand public policy it is important to wrestle with the institutional self-interest and personal policy preferences not just of Presidents but of judges, bureaucrats, and Congressional staffers. In American political democracy, for all its populism, significant power is wielded by unelected officials: they enjoy substantial discretion in the priority that they attach to particular issues and in interpreting legislative or constitutional language, and they frequently interact with one another in “iron-triangle” relationships that are little observed by journalists or elected politicians, yet can have a considerable impact on public policy.
According to this version of American politics, it might be possible for progressive social reform to happen independently of either bottom-up pressure or presidential leadership, provided that a desire to promote social justice exists within this permanent government. Such a contingency might be thought to be a remote one, but the years of the Nixon–Ford presidency (1969–77) provide an interesting illustration of reform emerging in this way.Footnote 9 Nixon's election embodied a strong reaction against the “excesses” of Great Society liberalism, and a desire to break with what he disdained as “Washington paternalism.” Yet the public-policy legacy of these years is far more progressive than that of any subsequent presidency, Democrat or Republican. Among these legacies are affirmative action, the desegregation of southern schools, bilingual education, the suspension of capital punishment, abortion rights, the Environmental Protection Agency, new civil rights protections for the disabled and the aged, the prohibition of gender discrimination in educational institutions, and a bar on job tests that have a “disparate impact” on ethno-racial minorities.
What is the explanation for this progressive legacy? Some historians have argued that Nixon was a more liberal President than one might think from his rhetoric or his electoral tactics, or that he selectively adopted liberal policies to advance his ambition to construct a new Republican majority from the ashes of the Great Society.Footnote 10 Alternatively, one could posit that these were years when the world of civil rights mass action broadened to encompass causes such as the rights of gays, the aged, Chicanos, American Indians, women, and children. Such explanations clearly have some merit. To a surprising degree, though, the breakthroughs listed in the previous paragraph were achieved in less conspicuous ways: through the executive branch, with relatively little presidential involvement; from Congress, with relatively little input from elected legislators; and from judges responding not to public opinion, or to broad forces of social protest, or to elected officials, but rather to little-known court-oriented public-interest groups such as the Center for Law and Social Progress (CLASP).
In each case, the impetus for reform came from educated elites: graduates of the nation's top law schools, especially Yale, eschewing careers in corporate America in favor of public-interest law or government service; high-level career officials and political appointees in Great Society-oriented agencies such as the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance, the free-standing Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, the Office for Civil Rights at Health Education and Welfare, and the Environmental Protection Agency. It is impossible to detach their drive, idealism and ambition from the African American freedom struggle, which clearly ignited in this remarkable cohort of beltway activists a passionate commitment to social justice. More interesting in the context of the present paper, however, is the fact that American democracy gave them so many avenues for pursuing an activist social agenda even after the era of mass protest epitomized by the Birmingham campaign of 1963 or the Columbia University antiwar protest of 1968 had come to an end, and even after Lyndon Johnson had given way to the bête noire of American liberalism, Richard Nixon.
That this should be the case reflects a mixture of broad and historically specific features of American politics. Thinking broadly, the dispersal of power between and within three separate branches of government, and between the federal government and the states, can be immensely frustrating for reformers, making it hard to achieve the kind of political power that can be achieved in a parliamentary system simply by winning a decisive legislative majority at election time. On the other hand, it also gives them far more points of access to political power, sometimes allowing them to make progress in seemingly unpropitious political times such as the early 1970s.
As for historically specific considerations, the key development was what political scientists call ‘regulatory federalism’.Footnote 11 The process begins with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbade discrimination on grounds of race, ethnicity or religion by any institution receiving federal funds. Unexpectedly, Title VI soon became an instrument of active social policy, used by the Johnson Administration as the central element in its effort to eliminate Jim Crow schools. That represented a major departure: previously, federal regulations had never had such far-reaching implications, but rather had been designed to secure such mundane objectives as statewide uniformity in programs receiving federal matching funds, or competent state administration.
After 1964, and with particular vigor after 1968, Title VI became a template, copied by administrators, public-interest groups and legislative staffers seeking to use the increasing financial clout of the Great Society federal state to impose progressive public policy on subnational governments and private corporations. In the case of bilingual education, the director of Richard Nixon's Office for Civil Rights determined in 1970 that Title VI entitled “language minorities” to schooling in their own language. In the case of gender discrimination in education institutions, Congressional staffers duplicated the language of Title VI in the Education Amendments of 1972 (as Title IX). And with disability rights, it was Congressional staffers – again – who added Title VI wording to the Rehabilitation Amendments of 1973. In not one of these three cases was there substantial discussion either in the media or among elected politicians, yet all three of these innovations would have transformative effects.Footnote 12 In other cases – EPA, OSHA – elected officials were much more directly involved in shaping public policy, but the key statutes still left federal civil servants with considerable administrative discretion.
How can these three very different reforming moments help us to understand the politics of social reform during the first five hundred days of the Obama administration? None of the evidence presented here is inconsistent with Kelley's central claim, namely that the forty-fourth President is likely to remain hesitant about leading the kind of principled crusade for social justice for which many of his warmest supporters yearn, absent substantial activist pressure. Rather, the three reform moments that have been briefly introduced in this paper help to explain why this should be so. First, compared to FDR and LBJ, President Obama enjoys slender partisan majorities on Capitol Hill. History teaches us that this need not be an overwhelming obstacle: during the Nixon–Ford administration, substantial reforms were achieved in an era of divided government; and Roosevelt and Johnson won substantial support from progressive Republicans. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, though, the two main political parties are probably more ideologically homogeneous, and more distant from one another, than at almost any point in American history: liberal Republicanism is essentially defunct, and there are far fewer conservative Democrats than before. Obama has striven throughout his brief career in national politics to project civility and reconciliation in an unusually febrile political climate: at the 2004 Democratic convention, he claimed to see not red states and blue states, but rather the United States of America, and as President he has worked very hard to win the support and trust of at least some Republicans (through his cabinet nominations, for example, and in lobbying for health care reform and his economic recovery package). But he has not enjoyed much success, and certainly nothing to compare with the cooperation that marked Lyndon Johnson's relationships with President Dwight Eisenhower during the 1950s (when LBJ was Democratic leader in the Senate), or with Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen (whose support for the 1964 Civil Rights Bill was crucial when LBJ was president).
Another contrast concerns declining faith in government. One consequence of the New Deal, argue historians such as David Kennedy, was to institute a new confidence among the American people in the beneficence of the federal government: programs such as rural electrification, social security, and the minimum wage created new connections between the American people and Washington that outlasted the Great Depression. As for Johnson, he came into politics as a committed New Dealer: as a young congressman, he brought electricity to the Hill Country west of Austin, where he had grown up. And by the time he was President, popular faith in the efficacy of government was at its zenith: polled by Gallup in 1964, 74 percent of Americans disclosed that they trusted their government to do the right thing all or nearly all of the time.
That faith was an essential precondition for the ambitious Great Society vision that LBJ promulgated in May of that year. At least as important, though, was another form of faith, namely faith within American governmental elites in the power of experts to solve complex social problems. This owed much to the success of Keynesian economics, much too to the advent of the computer, and much finally to the nation's recent scientific accomplishments, for example in the space race, and with the Salk vaccine for polio. This, in sum, was the era of what contemporaries termed the “knowledge revolution.” Supporting the war on poverty in 1964, Senator Hubert Humphrey celebrated the intoxicating new “discovery” that any problem, once identified, had a solution. And to the labor department's Daniel Patrick Moynihan it seemed in 1965 that defeating poverty would be easy: “the prospect that the more primitive social issues of American politics are at last to be resolved need only mean that we now turn to issues more demanding of human ingenuity.”Footnote 13 Such hubris arguably lay at the heart of many of the governmental crusades of the 1960s, including Kennedy's promise to send a man to the Moon by 1969, Robert McNamara's belief that Defense Department computers could defeat communism in Vietnam, and the bold, unfulfilled vision of racial justice that LBJ outlined at Howard University.
Intoxicating confidence among elites in their power to solve complex problems is not a marked feature among governmental elites since the 1960s, and neither is popular faith in government. The decline in both such forms of faith has fueled conservative antigovernment crusades ever since, as when Ronald Reagan famously declared that “government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.”Footnote 14 But it has also been embraced by the Democratic Presidents of the post-Great Society era: by Jimmy Carter, in his “malaise” speech (“government cannot solve our problems … It cannot eliminate poverty, or provide a bountiful economy, or reduce inflation”); by Bill Clinton, when he remarked that “the era of big government is over”; and by Barack Obama, when he lectured black audiences that parental responsibility and taking education seriously were key to African American uplift.Footnote 15
On important occasions in American history, progress toward social justice has been made when bottom-up social forces compelled a risk-averse political establishment to grasp a political nettle that it would far rather have avoided. So totemic is the greatest example of this tendency, the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, that it is tempting to view all struggles for justice in the United States through its prism. To an important degree, this is what is happening when historians such as Eric Foner, Ira Berlin and Steven Hahn tell the story of emancipation and reconstruction as one of black self-liberation. And, to a probably larger extent, this is also what is happening when New Left historians see the New Deal or the American Revolution as responses to bottom-up pressure.Footnote 16
Of the historical moments just referred to, the first – the era of emancipation, on which Kelley focused – seems by far the most analogous to the civil rights movement. The other three historical moments referred to in this essay – the New Deal, the Great Society era, and the Nixon–Ford Presidency – serve to illustrate the need to be cautious in assuming that social reform always takes place when social protest forces a President to act (not that Kelley makes any such assertion). They teach us first of all that presidential leadership can exist independently of bottom-up social forces, as during the New Deal. They teach us secondly that the link between social protest and federal leadership can sometimes be powerful but also indirect (as with the war on poverty). And the Nixon–Ford years remind us that presidential leadership and federal leadership cannot be taken to be synonymous: students of the politics of social policy must be prepared to wrestle with the Madisonian structures of American politics in all their complexity, unappetizing a prospect as that might sometimes seem to be.
I have known Robin Kelley for a long time. I was on the committee of the Organization of American Historians that awarded a prize to Robin for his first book, Hammer and Hoe,Footnote 17 which has had enormous influence both in content and in methodology. I trust this award and early recognition of his merit played a part in setting Professor Kelley on the course leading to his selection as the distinguished Harmsworth Professor. May I also add that there are still barriers to overcome. Neither the Harmsworth nor the Pitt Professorships have ever been occupied by an African American woman, though there are many outstanding historians who could be selected.
Since July 2009, I have been living with my wife, Nancy Hewitt, in the same house in which John and Aurelia Franklin resided while he was Pitt Professor at Cambridge in 1962–3. Nancy is the current Pitt Professor, and although she is not the first female Pitt Professor, she is only one of three who have held the post since 1945. I don't know what Oxford's record is along these lines and I don't want to offend my hosts, but my guess is that, as with Cambridge, there is much room for improvement.
Like Robin I was greatly influenced by John Hope Franklin, about whom I would like to say a few words. As an undergraduate in the 1960s, I read Reconstruction after the Civil War.Footnote 18 It taught me that history was really a matter of interpretation and not just a collection of facts and that the writing of history depended on context. I also learned, admittedly for the first time, that African Americans were agents of their own history and not merely victims. Franklin's Reconstruction also emphasized another point, which I think has become deemphasized in the writing of history since I left graduate school in the early 1970s: that is, national institutions – legal, political, and economic, have enormous power to shape and retard social and political change.
The last book I edited and published in 2008, One America in the 21st Century: the Report of President Bill Clinton's Initiative on Race,Footnote 19 dealt with the federal commission that Professor Franklin chaired in the late 1990s. He also wrote the preface to this volume shortly before his death, a collaboration that I will always cherish.
In his life and career John Hope Franklin demonstrated the intersection of the historian with the making of public policy. He contributed to the historical research for Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and he marched in Selma, Alabama for black freedom in 1965. He also had the ear of Presidents, particularly William Jefferson Clinton. John Hope spoke out against the persistence of racism – as Professor Kelley notes he did not accept the notion of a “postracial society” – but he also had faith that the federal government could bridge racial divides, and through dialogue erase some of the racial animosity, that block progress. Of course, he knew that grassroots conversations were not enough and that it would take passage of federal laws and their enforcement to create a just and more egalitarian society. To this end, the committee he chaired under President Clinton called for the elimination of racial profiling by the police, extension of health care to the uninsured, and the continuation of affirmative-action programs to provide educational and employment opportunities. Near the end of his life, John Hope became disappointed with President Clinton. Once a devoted Friend of Bill, Professor Franklin came to reevaluate Clinton following several remarks the former President made demeaning Barack Obama during the Democratic primary in which he opposed Hillary Clinton. Professor Franklin wondered just how much President Clinton had really been committed to implementing the racial initiative that John Hope had overseen.
As Professor Kelley cogently points out in his Harmsworth Lecture, race still matters very much in the US. I agree completely with his observation that President Obama does little good in attributing racism to “personal attitudes” rather than to the institutional and systemic barriers that continue to work against people of color. Failure to recognize this, and Obama is hardly alone, is a major problem. Color-blind universalism in combination with economic growth has been promoted before by Presidents including Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. The question now is whether the gains of the civil rights movement have finally created the foundation upon which policies of color-blind universalism, including universal health care, can result in genuine uplift for the poor and excluded of all races.
Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans suggest that the US has not reached that point. In spite of the initial outrage at the Bush administration's handling of rescue and recovery operations following the catastrophe and the media spotlight on the widespread poverty and institutional racism that left black New Orleanians most vulnerable to the disaster, the city is not being rebuilt in a way that, as Robin prescribes, would create a new, compassionate community.
I understand Professor Kelley's dismay with the rush by scholars and the media to compare Presidents Lincoln and Obama, which, he laments, only reinforces the great-man version of history. At the same time, historians and journalists also have compared Obama nearly as much to another President, Franklin Roosevelt, who set the first hundred day's yardstick by which all his successors have been judged, nearly all unfavorably.Footnote 20 One obvious source for comparison is the great recession facing Obama. Though not as severe as the Great Depression that Roosevelt encountered, FDR's handling of it might provide useful lessons, both successes and mistakes, for the current President, examples that he does not seem to have embraced. Which just goes to show how self-selective and often inscrutable are the lessons of history.
I agree with Professor Kelley about the shortcomings of the great-person (which should apply to both men and women) theory of history, but not entirely for the same reasons. In evaluating Obama – or any President, for that matter – I think it very important for historians to underscore what rarely gets mentioned, and that is the presence of institutional barriers to change. Obama, as other Presidents before him, confronts a Congress that mirrors the preferences of those voters going to the polls, which usually constitutes a relatively small number of those eligible to cast ballots. The membership of the House of Representatives reflects partisan apportionment schemes that protect incumbency and reinforce existing divisions. Furthermore, there exists a two-party system in the legislature that is highly polarized, and although Congress contains a majority of the president's Democratic Party, looks are deceiving. The balance of power among Democratic lawmakers resides in a small group of conservatives – now called centrists. At the same time, Obama has inherited a conservative Supreme Court that also places constraints on what he may accomplish or even seek to accomplish. So-called great men can only make so much history or as much as powerful, established institutions permit them. Political, legal, and institutional context matters.
How, then, does progressive change happen in the US? Professor Kelley answers that it comes through social movements. I agree that it does, but not without qualification. Change comes in tandem between social movements and capable leaders, call them something other than great people, but they are as important as they are necessary. Often they are Presidents. Like fire and air, social movements and national political leaders need each other to burn through the timbers of resistance.
Social movements, however, can go only so far. In an earlier version of the lecture, which I don't think was delivered, Professor Kelley discussed Jesse Jackson's run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in the mid-1980s. This, by the way, is one means of linking Barack Obama and his rise to the White House to the heritage of the civil rights movement. Jackson, himself a veteran of the movement, campaigned on its legacy. Though he tried to transcend strict racialist appeals through his Rainbow Coalition, he went down to defeat, especially in 1988, despite support from local grassroots organizations scattered around the nation. The basis of his support came mainly from black voters and he only captured 10 percent of white primary votes.
Obama learned some valuable political lessons, which we probably need to acknowledge more in our role as historians than as public intellectuals and political activists. Clearly Obama was identified as an African American no matter his biracial and foreign origins, but he had to run not so much as a black man, but as the well-educated, extremely smart, and articulate person he is. Having a beautiful wife and two adorable children didn't hurt. And given that his African roots only went back one generation and not ten and that his father was a Muslim, candidate Obama had to prove that he is an American. In fact, Obama is part of a post-civil rights (not postracial) generation of successful and ambitious black politicians, including Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, Corey Booker of Newark, and Artur Davis of Birmingham, seeking to run in majority non-black municipal, state and national arenas.Footnote 21 As a matter of strategy if not predisposition, such politicians have to defuse their racialist messages and adopt universalist language. Look at Obama's Jeremiah Wright problem that erupted during the primaries and furnishes a cautionary tale for the new generation of black politicians. In Obama's eloquent Philadelphia address on 18 March 2008, he tackled the issue of race, albeit reluctantly, and defused it to a considerable extent. He showed the kind of balancing skills which are his hallmark. Acknowledging the continued existence of racism, which black liberation ministers like Wright railed against, nevertheless he expressed a racial optimism generated by the advances the civil rights movement had made toward achieving a “more perfect Union.”Footnote 22 The crisis behind him, Obama has not addressed the delicate matter of race again.
Finally, I agree with Robin's praise of the grassroots activists that made the civil rights movement possible: Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Bob Moses, to name just a few. But why haven't their successors (and in Moses's case he still is working for change through his Algebra Project) engineered a nationwide or even regional social movement that is powerful enough to initiate and sustain the next phase toward economic and political transformation? I do not think it is merely a matter of the media shaping the news in a way that stifles change and distorts or ignores the activists working for it. Here again, I think context matters in explaining why Obama will probably not live up to the expectations of supporters like Professor Kelley and me. (I would parenthetically add that I detect in Robin an ironic wish that perhaps Barack Obama would become the great man he argues against embracing.) Great leaders, together with social movements, can make enormous change, but they do not exist in a historical vacuum. Abolitionism and civil war shaped Lincoln; labor unions and depression galvanized Franklin Roosevelt; the civil rights movement and the Cold War propelled (but also felled) Lyndon Johnson. So far the great recession does not appear critical enough to shake up political alignments and propel great change. President Obama also lacks the powerful, nationwide social movement that he needs behind him, and although he has been in office less than a year, time is running out to provide it.Footnote 23 Unless the context suddenly changes, Barack Obama may be the first and last African American President of the United States.
Robin Kelley prefaced his lecture with a comparison of his position as the first black Harmsworth Professor in Oxford in 2009 with that of John Hope Franklin as the first black Pitt Professor in Cambridge in 1962 – both men forty-seven years old at the time of their elections. Though no doubt far too modest, Kelley could have also made a comparison with another forty-seven-year-old “black first” at the time of his election: Barack Obama. It was, of course, the prospect of the ultimate black first – the self-described “unlikely” candidate who “didn't look the other presidents on American paper money” – which so captivated the attention of the world. During the campaign, even Republican nominee John McCain took a moment away from negative advertising to run a television spot congratulating Obama on being the first African American nominee for the presidency: “how perfect,” he said, that Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic Party convention fell on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. What made a black presidential victory all the more stunning was just how unlikely a black President had seemed pre-Obama's candidacy. And of course it was – as Obama pointed out in his inaugural speech – but half a century since his own father would not have been served in Washington.
As Kelley points out, commentators were quick to make comparisons between Obama and previous reforming Presidents – even if the comparisons were mostly simplistic and ignored the importance of social movements. But, strikingly, commentators made virtually no comparisons between Obama and previous “black firsts.” This omission was despite the fact that “black firsts” have long been a staple of Black History month. The names trip off the tongue: Hiram Rhodes (first black senator), Henry Ossain Flipper (graduate West Point), W. E. B. Du Bois (Harvard doctorate), Booker T. Washington (dine in White House), Jackie Robinson (major league baseball), Carl Stokes (mayor of a large city), even Barack Obama as president of Harvard Law Review, to name but a few. With Obama's rise to the presidency, the list now seemed complete. As John Hope Franklin (and countless others) put it, “I never thought I'd live to see the day.”
Perhaps it is precisely because the presidency is the ultimate black first, so far removed from the other categories on the list, that commentators chose not to draw comparisons. Comparing Obama's achievement to, say, Nat King Cole's “Mona Lisa” becoming the first black solo number 1 on the Billboard Charts, would have hardly seemed appropriate, let alone respectful. Moreover, comparing different sorts of black firsts in very different contexts is an imprecise exercise at best. But it is still instructive. The lessons of black firsts in American history warn against using them as barometers of racial progress, either within the particular field of achievement or for wider society. Indeed, some commentators in the past have used black firsts to camouflage racial inequalities, underscore race differences and hierarchies, and undermine calls for political intervention. Intriguingly, despite all the excitement surrounding Obama's success, telling echoes of the misuse and abuse of black firsts in the past resounded throughout Obama's campaign. As this essay will suggest, consideration of the wider discussions about Obama as a “black first” affirms Kelley's call to avoid assumptions that Obama's victory represents major progress in American race relations and to question whether Obama's election will automatically enable further progress towards race equality.
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
Obama, opening words of acceptance speech in Chicago, 4 November 2008.By quoting Harold Holzer: “Obama's victory serves to help … America fulfill its dream of equal opportunity regardless of race,” Kelley reminds us of the understandable American hoopla concerning the wider implications of Obama's victory. For Holzer and others (including, temporarily, a majority of African American respondents to polling on the question), that victory proved that America had taken a giant step away from the racial divisions that darkened its history, taking instead a step towards a postracial society.Footnote 24 The briefest of glances at previous black firsts, however, shows the absurdity of such a presumption. Henry Flipper, for example, graduated from West Point shortly before the nadir of white supremacy in the Army, nearly a century before full military integration. Obama tapped into this promise of a postracial society, not least at the outset of his victory speech in Chicago where he justified his (mandatory presidential) invocation of American exceptionalism by hailing his own election. Yet one suspects that his private views were less prone to hubris, certainly if his previous comments about being the first black president of the Harvard Law Review were anything to go by. In his autobiography, he attributed the “burst of publicity” surrounding his “black first” at the Review to “America's hunger for any optimistic sign from the racial front – a morsel of proof that, after all, some progress has been made.”Footnote 25
In fact, a closer look at the discourse anticipating a first black President also reveals more than a “morsel of proof” of negative signs on the racial front – negative signs that were reminiscent of the equivocal responses to black firsts throughout American history. In the first place, praise for the skills of black firsts has often served to pigeonhole black ability, particularly by setting black creative genius against white common sense. Take, for example, the breakthrough of black entertainers into respectable mainstream culture during the World War II era (a contrast to the association of Harlem Renaissance-era artists and sportsmen with low culture and sexual deviance). In 1941, leading sports writer Dean Cromwell praised the black man's “ability to sprint and jump” but attributed it to the fact it would have been “a life-and-death matter to him in the jungle.”Footnote 26 Duke Ellington, leader of the first all-black band to play at Carnegie Hall, grew frustrated at the praise he received as a musician, complaining, “The Negro is not merely a singing and dancing wizard.”Footnote 27 Hillary Clinton updated the genre at the height of the campaign when she argued, “Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.” Pointing to her record, Clinton vehemently denied that her praise for Obama's inspirational rhetorical skills and Johnson's hard-nosed executive skills were racially coded assertions about black speechmaking and white leadership. But black radio show hosts through to mainstream newspapers played up the story nonetheless. In a lead editorial, the New York Times condemned Clinton for “the distasteful implication that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change.”Footnote 28
Furthermore, discussions of black firsts and high achievers in the past have also served to underscore racial stereotypes precisely because they portrayed such folk as exceptional individuals rather than as representatives of the race. Joe Louis, the first black heavyweight champion to win a white following, won that following through his studiously respectable lifestyle and his patriotism. But the fact that his lifestyle was remarked upon for being respectable made a broader, negative, racial point. One New York Times sports reporter considered the question of Louis's
Color? Only in the tint of his skin. He doesn't drink or smoke. He doesn't turn racing cars upside-down. He doesn't sing or whistle or imitate four Hawaiians. He never has been sued for breach of promise. He puts his money in the bank. These are very sober qualities. All his striking qualities are in his two fists.Footnote 29
The same process of damning the race by praising the exception reappeared in a gaffe made, somewhat characteristically, by Joe Biden early in the campaign (quite an irony, given Biden's later relationship with Obama). “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden told a reporter. “I mean, that's a storybook, man.” As with Clinton, Biden was quick to deny the charge of racism – in particular, explaining that “clean as a whistle, sharp as a tack” was an expression his mother used to convey praise, rather than any allusions to drug taking.Footnote 30 But again, the damage was done (not just in terms of racial discourse, but to Biden's campaign). Obama sought to reverse the logic of individual black success implying generalized black failures during his set-piece speech later in the campaign. After summarizing the impact of past discrimination, Obama concluded, “What's remarkable is how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way.” As for the “many who didn't make it” they “were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination.”Footnote 31
Since the rise of Affirmative Action, black firsts have also suffered a further charge – that they gained their success because of their colour rather than earning it in their own right (let alone earning it despite their colour). During the election campaign, it was a charge levelled with some emotion by Geraldine Ferraro, the former Democratic vice presidential nominee, and an active Clinton supporter. “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” Ferraro told a reporter. “And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”Footnote 32 Ferraro did not take back the quote. Clinton distanced herself from the sentiment but she regularly complained that the media were in thrall to Obama. For his part, Obama condemned “the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.”Footnote 33 (In the brouhaha about race an important point was overlooked – that the latest black first, like so many before, would be by a man rather than a woman).
The performance of Obama as the first black President has the potential to influence discussion about race even more than his performance during the campaign. As African American comedienne Wanda Sykes put it at the first White House correspondents' dinner of his presidency. “I'm proud to be able to say the ‘first black President’ – that's unless you screw up and then it's going to be, “What's up with the half white guy? … who voted for that mulatto?”Footnote 34 In fact, at first blush, the conduct of Michelle Obama, the first black First Lady, may have at least as important an influence on race stereotypes. Writing in the Nation, prominent black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins thought Michelle Obama provided an answer to Collins's long-standing question, “[where] is a picture of black femininity (in particular, that of darker-skinned, nontragic femininity) that might signify beauty, chic, elegance, vulnerability, sophistication?”Footnote 35 (In the most recent polls, though, a majority of African American respondents who offered an opinion thought the conduct of the Obamas would make little if any difference to racial attitudes.)Footnote 36
Even on the narrow question of what Obama's victory might mean for the possibilities of a postracial electoral politics, a glance at the past reminds us that although a good number of black firsts turned out to be the “first of many,” there were also plenty that turned out to be the “first and last,” or at least, the “first of disproportionately few.” We need look no further than John Hope Franklin's time at Cambridge for one such “first and last” (so far), or to Obama's presidency of the Harvard Law Review for a “first of disproportionately few,” with one African American president in the twenty years since his tenure. Hiram Revels was succeeded by a black senator, but the next one followed more than eighty years later, and in the modern era only Massachusetts and Illinois have sent a black senator to Washington.
Thus breaching racial barriers has not always been the same as clearing them away for others (and in the case of Booker T. Washington, the white segregationist backlash over his dinner at the White House meant the barriers to a black man lobbying the President went up further). Moreover, even when a black first proved to be the “first of many,” it did not always represent a positive change in racial attitudes. In Jackie Robinson's case it did – and his impressive debut in Major League emboldened team owners to sign up the best talent from the Negro leagues. But Carl Stokes's election as mayor proved to be the “first of many” because of the changing demographics of urban politics rather than changing attitudes – indeed, the first black mayors assumed office at the height of the urban crisis, leading to an association between black office-holding and urban decay.
Whether Obama's victory proves to be the first of many, the first of a few, or the first and last, only time will tell. Intriguingly, Republicans chose an African American chairman, Michael Steele, soon after the election, and an Indian American, Governor Bobby Jindal, to respond to Obama's first State of the Union address. But the fact that Obama gained as many white voters as John Kerry had four years previously does not, in itself, portend postracial elections in the future. Polls did not, and could not, explore the question why white voters were content to vote for this particular black candidate, and how they might respond to black candidates more generally. What is clear is that unlike Stokes's election, Obama's victory seems much more of an outlier in terms of recent state-wide voting patterns. Indeed, like many previous black firsts, Obama's victory was startling precisely because his chosen field was still predominantly a white man's game. He was the only nonwhite candidate for either party (just as Clinton was the only female candidate). Nearly half a century after the Voting Rights Act, when Obama moved from Congress to the White House, he left behind a lily-white Senate.
The broader camouflage question – when a black first is misused as evidence of an egalitarian society – has also recurred through history. Or, to put it more bluntly, if one person could make it, then the reason others didn't was their fault, not the fault of the system. For example, Booker T. Washington's success through hard work and avoidance of controversy undermined early NAACP calls for federal intervention in the South. As Kelley points out, in Obama's day, “conservatives and many liberals have read [his] election as marking the end of racism. This has had a chilling effect on public discussions or acknowledgement of contemporary racism.” No doubt Obama chafed against such assertions. When elected to the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, Obama had told reporters, “it's important that stories like mine aren't used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks.”Footnote 37
This victory alone is not the change we seek – it is only the chance for us to make that change.
Barack Obama, Acceptance Speech.Ironically, the very fact that Obama was running to be a black first may have constrained him from speaking out that everything was not “O.K. for blacks.” Some black firsts have used their historic achievements as springboards for action – Du Bois being a case in point. But many black firsts in the past who sought mainstream acceptance had to temper or even mask their critiques of American society – Booker Washington, Joe Louis, and Jackie Robinson to name but three who admitted privately how much they resented staying mute on race inequality. The furore over Michelle Obama's alleged Black Power dissertation, and the New Yorker cover with her as a gun-toting Black Panther, showed just how careful Obama needed to be to avoid being caricatured as a threateningly black candidate.
Certainly Obama distanced himself from the traditional civil rights leadership. In fact, he asserted that there was no movement left to lead. In Dreams from My Father, he recalled the moment, as a student, when he realized, “The movement had died years ago, shattered into a thousand fragments … every strategy exhausted.”Footnote 38 As a new senator, Obama avoided being tied too closely to the Congressional black caucus. In turn, established black leaders and civil rights veterans such as John Lewis and Jesse Jackson did not initially endorse him.
Nor did he allow himself to be pigeonholed as a spokesman for black America. As he put it in The Audacity of Hope, “I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity … or victimhood generally.”Footnote 39 Obama severed his links with both Jeremiah Wright's church (eventually) and ACORN when controversy broke, though neither group in reality resembled their media caricatures, and both were important to his campaign. He even delivered a very public rebuke to black fathers during a Fathers' Day campaign speech, saying that too many were “acting like boys.” Jesse Jackson was so infuriated that he said (in what he thought was a private comment) “See, Barack's been talking down to black people … I want to cut his nuts off.”Footnote 40
Obama did talk about effective civil rights enforcement. During the campaign he told the NAACP convention that he stood for “removing the barriers of prejudice and misunderstanding that still exist in America … It means changing hearts and changing minds and making sure that every American is treated equally under the law.” But what is most striking about his campaign speeches is how little he talked of the growing gap between black (and Latino) Americans and white Americans on virtually every socioeconomic indicator. Instead, his remedy was to float every underprivileged boat rather than target persistent racial inequalities. Audacity of Hope was a case in point, promising “strategies that help all Americans … schools that teach, jobs that pay, health care for everyone who needs it.” On the sensitive issue of Affirmative Action, he advocated a “properly structured” version that “can open up opportunities otherwise closed to qualified minorities without diminishing opportunities for white students.”
In his speech on race at the height of the Jeremiah Wright affair, Obama insisted that “race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.” Yet considering that Obama sought to be America's first black President, it is striking just how few meaningful discussions of remedies for embedded racial disparities there actually were. None of the three presidential debates included even a single question about race – not even the debate at Ole Miss, scene of one of the bloodiest clashes during the civil rights movement. Obama's set-piece speech on race spoke mostly of the need for understanding and the urgency of moving beyond racial division, using his own biography as an example of the possibilities. In terms of policy, he reiterated his call for postracial policies for all the disadvantaged: instead of interminably arguing about race, “we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children.”
What is not in doubt is the consummate skill with which Obama navigated the question of colour. He pointed out that as a black candidate he often found himself in something of a no-win situation. “At various stages in the campaign,” he complained with some justification, “commentators have deemed me either ‘too black’ or ‘not black enough.’” His genius was in transforming the potential electoral handicap of his colour into a powerful asset for an electorate eager for change. But the very fact that he had to walk the tightrope between being too black and not black enough shows that his stunning victory as a black first – as was the case with so many before him – may say rather more about his own abilities than about racial progress in America.
Kelley concludes his lecture by saying, “where President Obama moves will depend on how he's pushed.” The irony, then, is that a particularly strong push may be needed to move him to confront embedded and growing racial inequalities precisely because Obama is America's first black President.