It is finally possible, in this nation so profoundly and for so long divided by race, for a Black man to become president.
"War, Peace, Justice, and the Elections"
A War Resisters League Statement
Election Night, 2008—A commentator on CNN this evening mentioned that it had been 43 years since the historic voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. A little later I spoke with someone who was on that march, who said that if you had asked her then whether the United States could elect a Black man to the presidency, she'd have said, "Not in my lifetime!"
The march, in the spring of 1965, was the culmination of a hard-fought campaign to make the franchise a reality for African-Americans in the South. Almost a century after the ratification of the 15th amendment to the Constitution, which declared that the right to vote could not “be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” poll taxes and lynch mobs still stood between most Southern Black citizens and the vote. Thousands—Southerners and Northerners—had worked to change that; some, like Southerner James Chaney and Northerners Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and Viola Liuzzo, had died to change it. Later that year, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.
Let me be clear: I expect almost nothing from Barack Obama that we wouldn't have gotten from Hillary Clinton--indeed, almost nothing we didn't get from Bill Clinton. Obama, like all the presidents before him including George W. Bush, represents the war machine--although it is possible he represents a somewhat more prudent element of that machine than did Bush; he represents capitalism, although it is almost certain that his domestic policies will be less devastating than Bush's; he uncritically supports Israel.
Yet for me, and, I suspect, for many of us who lived through and participated in the civil rights efforts of the '60s, the fact that this has happened in our lifetime after all is, in itself, deeply moving. My African-American nephew DeShawn (above), now seventeen months old, unlike his own mother, will never have known a world in which it could not have happened.
This past weekend, I was on a family road trip. My white brother was driving, I was sitting next to him in the front seat, and a bunch of Black teenagers were sitting in the back of the car carrying on like--well, like teenagers. My brother played Mavis Staples' "We'll Never Turn Back" cd, and I was singing along with "We Shall Not Be Moved," when a voice asked from the back, "Aunt Judith, you like that music?" It was clear she meant, "You like that tired old music?" I admitted to liking it, old as it is. I said, "Once, it moved a movement."
So this is all: What has happened is not revolutionary. It represents no change in the structures of power that allot so much to so few, and so little to so many. It will feed no hungry children; it will house no homeless. It won't change, by the smallest increment, the proportion of the poor, the hungry, the homeless, in this country and in the world, who are people of color.
But a generation ago, we had to march--some of us had to die—so that Black people might vote. Something has changed. We have something to build on—and our work cut out for us if we are to build on it.
© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2008
