Obama’s moment: Key point in U.S. history

updated 6:00 p.m. ET June 3, 2008

The principle that all men are created equal has never been more than a remote eventuality in the quest for the presidency. But with the Democratic nomination finally in Barack Obama's grasp, that ideal is no longer relegated to someday.

Someday is now.

It is a history-making moment — though Obama is not necessarily the candidate many might have expected to make that history. He is the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas. He's too young to remember the civil rights struggle, let alone to have been a soldier in the fight.

"He was impossible to anticipate," says Shola Lynch, director of a documentary about the 1972 campaign waged by Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the New Yorker who was the first black woman to vie for the presidency.

In a country whose self-identity has been warped by racial prejudice since the beginning, this moment has taken an eternity to arrive. Or, viewed over the spectrum of a long, painful history, relatively little time at all.

After MLK
After all, it has been just 45 years since Martin Luther King Jr. declared his dream for a colorblind America, just over 30 years since Mississippi disbanded the sovereignty commission that fought to maintain segregation and deny blacks their rights.

Other notable black candidates have run for the highest office. Some waged serious campaigns that, at least when it came to the prospect of winning the nomination, were never taken seriously.

"I grew up and matured in the height of the civil rights movement and there was no thought then of a black man being president of the United States. We had barely begun to vote then," says Ronald Walters, who served as deputy director of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's run for the presidency in 1984.

"It was hard for us, even in the Jackson campaign, to get our arms around this, the fact that there would be a black president of the United States — even though we were running," says Walters, now a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland.

Nomination milestone
But even as they marvel at Obama's rise, Walters and others say it will take time to appraise what it says about the nation's political and cultural state of mind. Can he be elected? How long will it take before other viable black candidates — not to mention women — compete for the presidency?

Obama's likely nomination is a milestone, but it is not at all clear where that marker is posted. His ascendance could prove to be a fairly isolated event, the creation of extraordinary coincidences, or something more.

"The nation has come a long way," when a major party demonstrates its support for a presidential nominee who is not a white male, says Thomas J. Davis, author of the book "Race Relations in America" and a professor of history at Arizona State University.

But "what does it tell us aside from that fact, which we can see right before our eyes?"

Nation readies itself
Some may see Obama's success as marking a revolution in the politics of race. In fact, it's the latest incremental step — albeit the most noticeable one — in a gradual evolution.

By the early 1960s, pressure was building. Activists clashed with police in Selma, Ala., in a history-making demand for the right to vote. Congress passed the National Voting Rights Act to eliminate the literacy tests many Southern States used to keep black voters from the polls. That led to much greater black voter participation and the first significant entry of black candidates and office holders.

Change came, but slowly. In 1965, Massachusetts voters chose Edward Brooke for a Senate seat, but it wasn't until 1993 that another black candidate was elected to the chamber.

In 1972, Chisholm, a New York congresswoman, became the first black woman to pursue the presidency, waging a campaign to end the Vietnam War and give voice to the silent in the nation's policy-making. Jesse Jackson followed in 1984 and 1988, paving the way for the candidacies of Alan Keyes, Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun.

Still, it wasn't until 1989 that Virginia made L. Douglas Wilder the nation's first black elected governor.

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