Historians write 1st draft on Obama victory

Bill Dedman Investigative reporter • Profile • E-mail

It's historic, certainly, but what does it mean? Msnbc.com asked American historians who have focused on civil rights issues to react to the victory of Sen. Barack Obama.

Below are their essays, a first draft of history.

Readers are invited to add your comments on our Witnessing History blog.

James Grossman, Newberry Library, Chicago

Last night hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered in the streets of our cities to celebrate a moment that is self-consciously "historic." However much Barack Obama refused to be defined by race; however often he reminded us of the white grandparents who raised him; however wittily he joked that the "Bradley effect" would paralyze him in the voting booth: countless sentences spilled across the media referring to "history being made" or the "milestone in our nation’s history." The narrative of progress, the satisfaction of having bridged the nation’s historic divide is irresistible. 

It also is overstated and somewhat misleading.  It is impossible to understate the symbolic significance of a nation with our past choosing an African-American to our highest position of leadership. The message to black children is unmistakable. The message to white children is different, but equally unmistakable. To one we are saying: "yes you can."  To the other, we are saying "yes they can." 

But this is not the end of history. As we congratulate ourselves for overcoming four centuries of racial oppression, we need to recognize the extent to which Barack Obama also stands outside of that history. Barack Obama stands tall as a symbol of black achievement but he does so as a man with no roots in those aspects of the black American experience that have poisoned American race relations. He has no roots in American slavery, the era of Jim Crow, or urban ghettos.  Is it possible that the only African-American who could cross the fragile bridge across the racial divide was a man unassociated with the great crucibles of African-American life?

The lesson, perhaps, lies somewhere else. It lies in Sarah Palin’s invocation of a "real America" somewhere in the small towns and cities across the nation, with their mythical Joes sporting American flags and toting rifles. The real America was in the streets last night. Hundreds of thousands of them in Los Angeles, in front of the White House, in Chicago’s Grant Park. I saw some of them on the bus as I rode home from work: "ordinary" people, dressed in less than fashionable clothes, heading downtown to share in the "historic" moment. Black and white; immigrant and native born; young and old; poor, working-class, and affluent. All were in Grant Park, collegially sharing the moment and responding to the leadership of a social movement that seeks to redefine our civic culture. Barack Obama is not only a black man. He is the son of an immigrant. The son of a single mother. A real American.

James Grossman is the author of "Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration," and the coeditor of "The Encyclopedia of Chicago." He is vice president for research and education at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

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Robert O. Self, Brown University

The United States is a young country. Too young, perhaps. We do not always appreciate what the French call the longue duree — the long term of history. But that is the best vantage from which to view Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential campaign. Has racism vanished? No. White privilege? No.

But is there a thread of history connecting Obama with Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Pauli Murray, Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fanny Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael, John Lewis, Shirley Chisholm, Marion Wright Edelman, and a long list of others? Yes. Without a doubt.

African-American history has defined the longue duree in the United States. Slavery could not be ended in 200 years, much less in a single generation. Jim Crow took nearly a hundred years to eradicate. Civil rights and full equality, after three generations of tireless work, are an ongoing work-in-progress. The persistence of the black "freedom struggle," dating to the 1620s, is one of the defining elements of the history of this nation.

Is Obama’s victory a chapter in that history? Yes and no. Our oldest, deepest, most persistent myth, that of race, can also be our most superficial. Too much ink has been spilled in declaring Obama a "post-racial" candidate. What? How can the son of an African immigrant, in the land that stole nearly three centuries of labor from Africa in the name of white racial supremacy, be post-racial? He can’t.

And that is the beautiful irony of race in America. It is fixed and fluid at the same time. Obama both embodies and transcend his, and our, "race." As the inheritor of a political tradition that stretches from Vesey to King, from Susan B. Anthony to Franklin Roosevelt, Obama is the liberal citizen triumphant, the citizen who exists beyond color and speaks to our common destiny. But he is also the prodigal black son, the inheritor of the injuries of racial chauvinism who rises despite the burden.

What is most important about Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, is that for the first time in the nation’s history, to get us out of a jam we turned to, and trusted, a black man. And, frankly, who better? For who has worked harder for, invested more in, and believed more passionately in this nation than its black citizens? None. Perhaps it high time that, collectively as a nation, we came to realize that.

Robert O. Self teaches and writes on 20th century U.S. history. His principal research interests are in urban history, the history of race and American political culture, post-1945 U.S. society and culture, and gender in the mid-century city. His first book, "American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland," was published by Princeton University Press in 2003. He is at work on a book about gender, sexuality, and political culture in the U.S. from 1965 to 1980.

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Peniel E. Joseph, Brandeis University

Sen. Barack Obama’s historic election as the nation’s first black president is a watershed historical event that will impact African-Americans in at least three significant ways. First, it transforms the very aesthetic of the nation’s democracy. This transformation goes beyond symbolism. Like a surrealist painter, Obama has successfully willed a world that could once only be imagined into being. The iconography of the Obama administration over the next four years will reverberate throughout all levels of the black community, instilling a sense of pride and optimism while inspiring a new generation about their own ability to achieve their share of the American dream.

Second, an Obama presidency forces contemporary black activists to maintain a new level of vigilance. As America’s first black president Obama will be under tremendous pressure to not show any kind of racial favoritism in public policy. Twenty-first century era civil rights activists must apply equally measures of pressure to ensure that struggles for racial and economic justice no longer remain on the fringes of the country’s national political debate.

Finally, the ultimate impact of Obama’s presidency on the black community will be measured by public policy. With national fatigue over Affirmative Action, Obama’s willingness to propose bold and universal programs to promote jobs, good schools, affordable healthcare and safe neighborhoods will have the most concrete and beneficial effect on black America.

If Obama’s election illustrates the tremendous strides in racial progress made in America since the 1960s, high rates of black poverty, unemployment and incarceration attest to the long journey that lies ahead. Ultimately, the most immediate effects of the nation’s first black president on African-Americans may be in allowing a new generation of young people to realize their enormous potential by imagining a world where their dreams actually can come true and the possibilities for advancement are unlimited.

Peniel E. Joseph teaches at Brandeis University and is the author of the award winning "Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America."

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