While America relished in the historic moment of Sen. Barack Obama’s triumph over Sen. Hillary Clinton last Tuesday, it is unclear whether the country remembers the roadblocks that had to be cleared or the battles that were waged to solidify Obama’s success.
A little more than four decades ago, it was uncommon to see a black man vote without intimidation, let alone run for office. Now, 68% of voters say they believe America is ready for a black president, according to a CBS poll.
This recent reality is an indirect result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which some call the single most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever passed by Congress. The act prohibited the use of violence and intimidation to deny a person the right to vote.
Civil rights organizations rallied their resources to push voting rights to the forefront of issues leading up to the 1964 presidential election.
“Barack is standing on the shoulders of Fannie Lou Hamer and the named and unnamed people who worked behind and in front of the scenes so that we could be empowered to have our voices heard,” says Desiree S. Pedescleaux, president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.
Obama’s speech during the 2004 Democratic National Convention helped ignite his popularity and set the stage for his eventual bid for the White House. Similarly, in 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and civil rights activist, made one of the most notable speeches ever broadcast from the floors of the DNC. In her speech, Hamer questioned whether this was really “the land of the free and the home of the brave” when lives were threatened because of attempting to vote.
Despite losing her job and receiving a savage beating prompted by her voter registration efforts, Hamer joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and continued to register others to vote in Mississippi. She organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party because the Mississippi Democratic Party refused to seat any black delegates. Hamer’s speech in 1964 and the work of the Freedom Democrats influenced the Democratic Party to adopt a clause which demanded equal representation at the 1968 delegation.
Between 1965 and 1988, black voter registration rates increased by 63% in Mississippi alone. In five southern states, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas, the total increase of black elected officials between 1970 and 2000 was more than tenfold.
“Prior to the Voting Rights Act there were about 70 black elected officials. It soared to around 2,000 soon after, and now there are some 10,000 changing the law to bring down the barriers,” says Michael Fauntroy, assistant professor of public policy at George Mason University.
The act helped open the door for the first black mayors and congressmen including politicians such as Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the first black senator elected since Reconstruction, and Cleveland’s Carl B. Stokes, the nation’s first black mayor.
“[Former] mayors such as David Dinkins [of New York] and Tom Bradley [of Los Angeles] made Americans look at black elected officials in different ways. Even those who are not African American have been helpful for setting the stage for the first black president,” says Fauntroy, author of Republicans and the Black Vote.
Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress in 1968, became the first black woman from a major party to run for president of the United States.
“Shirley Chisholm, Angela Davis, and Jesse Jackson ran not so much knowing they would be elected president,” Pedescleaux says. “They ran to
get the issues out and on the table. Once the major parties see interest in those issues, they absorb them and [those issues] become part of the major party agenda. Shirley Chisholm fought for women’s rights, and now women are a big part of both of the parties, and women’s issues are woven into the agendas of both major parties.”“Before Barack Obama, no African American had done as well as Jesse Jackson Sr. did in his presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988,” Fauntroy says.
Jackson, founder of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, won 11 primaries and caucuses and 1,218 of the 3,911 delegates in 1988. He came in second at the Democratic National Convention of that year. At one point, after winning the Michigan primary, Jackson was considered the frontrunner in the race, ahead of Michael Dukakis, the eventual Democratic nominee, and future vice president Al Gore.
“In many ways I think that Jackson was responsible for mobilizing black people in the 1980s,” says Wilbur C. Rich, the William R. Kenan professor of political science at Wellesley College. “He said this is the second stage of the civil rights movement. A lot of people voted for the first time. He was going into places that white candidates never went to, and it was good.”
Despite Jackson’s victories and winning the caucus in Vermont, a state that, according to 1980 census figures, was 99% white, Jackson and his candidacy has in recent years been somewhat dismissed as less than substantial. This is because, among other reasons, he was a candidate that strongly advocated for issues directly affecting the black community.
Unlike Jackson, it seems that Obama is considered by many as the American candidate as opposed to just the black candidate. Constituents felt the same way about Douglas Wilder of Virginia, the country’s first black governor, and Norman Rice, who in 1989 was elected Seattle’s first black mayor despite a black population of less than 10%.
According to a recent Gallup poll, a large majority of black people, 78%, and an even larger majority of white people, 88%, say the fact that Obama is black makes no difference in terms of their likelihood of voting for him for president. “The country is ready [for a black president] because of Obama’s presence, his personality and his life story,” Fauntroy says.