Historians write 1st draft on Obama victory

Vicki L. Ruiz, University of California-Irvine

The plot seemed right out of a 1940s Hollywood movie — pretty Rosie the Riveter meets dashing co-worker; he goes off to fight for their country and upon his return, they fall in love and decide to marry. Credits roll. However, this 1948 landmark California State Supreme Court case brought into stark relief the centrality of race in this real life scenario. Andrea Pérez was the daughter of Mexican immigrants; her fiancé Sylvester Davis was African-American. Fully aware that California’s anti-miscegenation code prohibited their marriage, they hired an attorney to challenge this discriminatory law. Indeed, after a Los Angeles County clerk denied the couple a marriage license, Andrea Pérez filed suit.

The California Supreme Court in the 1948 case Pérez v. Sharp ruled the state anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional, an unprecedented move by a state judicial body. In the words of Justice Roger Traynor: "We are dealing here with legislation which involves one of the most basic rights of man. ... Marriage and procreation are fundamental. ... Legislation infringing upon such rights must be based on more than prejudice and must be free from oppressive discrimination to comply with the constitutional requirements of due process and equal protection of the law.’"

Earl Warren served as governor of California at the time the court handed down its historic decision. In 1967, he would preside as chief justice in Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court case that struck down all remaining state anti-miscegenation laws. This now forgotten case stood as a sentinel for a larger civil rights movement to come. Sixty years after Pérez v. Sharp, a child borne of an interracial marriage, Barack Obama, will become the next President of the United States.

Vicki L. Ruiz is Dean of the School of Humanities and Professor of History and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Past president of the Organization of American Historians, she is the author of "From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America" and the editor of "Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia," with Virginia Sánchez-Korrol.

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Renee Romano, Oberlin College

Last night, Barack Obama made history, becoming the first African-American to ever be elected president. Obama’s successful bid for the White House signals change on so many fronts — it demonstrates the enormous strides African-Americans have made since the 1960s and the transformation of the American political landscape as the baton is passed to a new generation of Americans who grew up in the post-civil rights movement era.

But of all the historic moments that were part of Barack Obama’s candidacy for president, none stuck me more forcefully than Obama’s white relatives sitting in support of him at the Democratic Convention. Obama identifies himself proudly as an African-American, but throughout the campaign, he publicly embraced his white extended family, repeatedly praising his mother and grandmother, and speaking with pride of his white uncle, a World War II veteran.

With so many milestones in Obama’s run for the presidency, the fact that Obama is the son of a black father and a white mother who speaks with obvious affection for his multiracial family has sometimes been lost in the mix. But Obama’s comfort in his own skin, his embrace of his complex racial identity, and the apparent willingness of the American people to accept him as he is represents a milestone in America’s history.

While relationships across color lines and multiracial families have existed throughout America’s past, such relationships and families were largely hidden from public view, considered shameful, degraded, and even disgusting. In 1961, the year Barack Obama was born, close to 30 states still had laws barring marriages between people of different races, the vast majority of whites (close to 100 percent in Gallup Polls) disapproved of black-white marriages, and those who dared to cross the color line were considered racial degenerates. Sociology textbooks warned that children of mixed marriages would be maladjusted and would face harsh societal discrimination from both blacks and whites.

Barack Obama’s success, his loving extended family, and his easy handling of his racial identity, shows how much things have changed since he was born. In the last 40 years, the black freedom struggle, increased immigration from non-European countries and changing racial attitudes have opened new avenues for Americans of all races to interact on a plane of relative equality.

While Barack Obama’s victory does not mean racism has disappeared or that the racial categories and identity no longer matter, it does signal a new maturity in America’s racial history, as the country comes to tolerate, and perhaps even accept, itself as a cosmopolitan, racially complicated place.

Renee Romano is associate professor of History at Oberlin College in Ohio. She is the author of "Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America" (Harvard University Press, 2003) and co-editor of "The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory" (University of Georgia Press, 2006). She is at work on a new book, tentatively entitled, "Justice Delayed: Civil Rights Trials and America's Racial Reckoning."

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Michael Honey, University of Washington

At this summer’s Republican Convention, Sarah Palin mocked Barack Obama, and Rudy Guliana exclaimed, “Community organizer: What!!?”

They didn’t get it then, but maybe the Republicans get it now. We have seen a beautiful model of organizing by the Obama campaign.

As an organizer in the downtrodden, gang-infested streets of the Black and Latino communities of South Side Chicago in the 1980s, Obama saw plant closings and disinvestment destroy lives and communities.

Back then, he couldn’t explain exactly what organizing meant. Instead, “I’d pronounce on the need for change… Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.” (Dreams From My Father, 133)

Obama went on to law and politics to find greater leverage. He also tapped into Martin Luther King’s politics of hope. That combination has opened up the country to the possibility of new politics, and new goals.

So today, as King asked in 1968, “where do we go from here?” King sought big goals: redistribution of wealth and power, an end to racism and war, a “moral revolution.” He wrote, “we must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society.”

Obama doesn’t promise to take us that far. He is a reformer, not a radical. But like King, he envisions a program to deal with racial inequality by reaching beyond race to address problems facing all working people.

With our economy and government practically in ruins, Democrats will be hard pressed to address our economic disaster. We did it under worse times in the 1930s, and we can do it again today. Some of us will be pressing for a new law restoring the right of workers, without fear of firing, to organize unions, which remain the best “anti-poverty program,” according to King.

Obama’s campaign has shown that ordinary people can do extraordinary things when working together. His election victory affirmed the power of organizing. Now it’s time for phase two, for churches, unions, community and other organizations to demand action from government.

In my hometown of Tacoma, Washington, I witnessed the unique vibrancy of the Obama campaign. I have never seen more involved, energized people, working so hard in an election campaign. It was true virtually everywhere.

The movement that elected Obama now needs to push on to implement change, to make real the promise of hope that was restored in this election.

Let’s hope 2008 marks the beginning of saving democracy. That won’t happen without mass involvement. As King would tell us, we still need to organize.

Michael Honey is the Fred and Dorothy Haley professor of humanities at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and Harry Bridges chair of labor studies emeritus at the University of Washington. He is national president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, which includes more than 500 labor historians. He has published three award-winning books, including "Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign" (WW Norton, 2007).

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