The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  A few of us sat in the minister’s office exulting in the camaraderie and lighthearted banter that black preachers share before the Word is delivered.

  “What’s up, Doc,” the Reverend Al Sharpton, the morning’s featured preacher, greeted me.

  “What’s up, Reverend? Looking forward to your sermon this morning.”

  I had walked into the church office with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, whose coattails I had much earlier followed into my own ministry and, during his historic run for the presidency, into serious political engagement. I had heard Jackson preach in person for the first time in 1984 on Easter Sunday at Knoxville College in Tennessee. The tall, charismatic leader had cut a dashing figure as he delivered a thrilling sermon-as-campaign-speech in which he criticized President Reagan’s military budget, with its priority on missiles and weapons, saying the document represented “a protracted crucifixion” of the poor.1

  “We need a real war on poverty for the hungry and the hurt and the destitute,” Jackson proclaimed. “The poor must have a way out. We must end extended crucifixion, allow the poor to realize a resurrection as well.”

  Jackson argued that President Reagan had to “bear a heavy share of the responsibility for the worsening” plight of the poor. “It’s time to stop weeping and go to the polls and roll the stone away.” Jackson also blasted cuts in food stamps, school lunches, and other social programs.

  “People want honest and fair leadership,” he said. “The poor don’t mind suffering,” but, the presidential candidate declared, “there must be a sharing of the pain.” Jackson clinched the powerful parallel between Christ’s crucifixion and the predicament of the poor, especially the twelve thousand folk who had been cut off from assistance, when he cried out that the “nails never stop coming, the hammers never stop beating.”

  It is easy to forget, in the Age of Obama, just how dominant Jackson had been after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, how central he had been to black freedom struggles and the amplifying of the voices of the poor.2 It was in Selma, during the marches in 1965, that a young Jackson was introduced to King by Ralph Abernathy and began to work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He had only later been shoved to the political periphery by the rush of time and the force of events, and viewed as a relic—or worse, as a caustic old man—after he was caught on tape wishing to do away with Obama’s private parts. Jackson’s weeping visage later flashed on-screen at the celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park of Obama’s first presidential election. Some viewed Jackson’s sobbing as the crocodile tears of an envious forebear. In truth, Jackson was overcome with emotion at a triumph for which he had paved the way. Sharpton was now the nation’s most prominent civil rights leader; relations between him and Jackson alternated between frosty and friendly.

  Jackson had been Sharpton’s mentor as well as mine, and the two embraced in a genial half hug before Sharpton squeezed onto the couch between Jackson and Andrew Young, the former UN ambassador, Atlanta mayor, trusted lieutenant to King—and a father figure of sorts to Jackson. The reunion of Jackson and Young, with Sharpton at the center, was a bit of movement theater. The occasion in Selma had brought together three generations of the bruising patriarchy that black leadership had so often been, with its homegrown authority and blurred lines of succession. I could not let the opportunity pass to quiz Young about his thoughts on Obama and race in the company of his younger compatriots. The elder statesman pitched his views about the president to the home base he knew best: Dr. King and the arm of the movement he had helmed.

  “Well, you know, Martin always depended on me to be the conservative voice on our team,” Young said, smiling and with a twinkle in his eyes less than a week before his eighty-third birthday. I knew this story, but it was delightful to hear Young regale us with his witty retelling.3

  “I remember one day Hosea Williams [an aide whom King dubbed his “Castro”] and James Bevel [an aide and radical visionary] were off on their left-wing thing,” Young recalled, glancing across at their sometime collaborator Jesse Jackson, who, despite his seventy-three years, had a boyishly mischievous grin etched on his face. “And I was tired of fighting them, so I agreed with what they were proposing.” Young gathered himself on the couch, lurched forward slightly, and delivered the punch line with the confidence of a man who had told this story a few thousand times before.

  “Martin got really mad at me. He pulled me aside and said, ‘Andy, I don’t need you agreeing with them. What I need you to do is stake out the conservative position so I can come right down the middle.’” King found it useful to be more moderate than his wild-eyed staff, yet more radical than Young, the designated “Tom” of the group. It might be plausibly argued that Obama’s own hunt for a middle ground between Democrats and Republicans was a later echo of some of King’s ideological inclinations, a balancing tendency that led historian August Meier to dub the civil rights leader “The Conservative Militant.”4

  I did not quite know what to expect from Young on the topic of Obama; in 2007, when he was a supporter of Hillary Clinton’s in the 2008 election, he had pointed to Obama’s inexperience and poked fun at his racial authenticity, which he said lagged behind Bill Clinton’s blackness. But I suspected the ambassador had come around. It seemed that Young, taking a page from King’s book, might travel between Jackson, whose criticism of Obama had been largely subterranean, given his chastened status, and Sharpton, who made a decision never to publicly criticize Obama about a black agenda as a matter of strategy. But Young’s brief answer still surprised me for its empathy toward Obama.

  “Look, there’s a lot on his plate. And he’s got to deal with these crazy forces against him from the right. I think that Obama has done the best he could under the circumstances.”

  Young’s answer contained a good deal of wisdom: Obama has faced levels of resistance that no president before him has confronted. No president has had his faith and education questioned like Obama. No other president has had his life threatened as much.5 No other president has dealt with racial politics in Congress to the extent of being denied an automatic raise in the debt ceiling, causing the nation’s credit rating to drop. No other president has had a representative shout “You lie!” during a speech to Congress. No other president has been so persistently challenged that he had to produce a birth certificate to settle the question of his citizenship. University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone has argued that “no president in our nation’s history has ever been castigated, condemned, mocked, insulted, derided and degraded on a scale even close to the constantly ugly attacks on Obama.” Stone says Obama “has been accused of . . . refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, of seeking to confiscate all guns, of lying about just about everything he has ever said, ranging from Benghazi to the Affordable Care Act to immigration, of faking Osama bin Laden’s death and funding his campaign with drug money.”6

  Young is right that it has been difficult for Obama to address race and black concerns in such a toxic environment. Obama is wedged between the obstructions of the right and the obsessions of racists who prayed that a black presidency would never come. Some African Americans feared that the obstacles Obama faced would be used as an excuse not to help blacks, lest he appear to pander to his tribe. Obama fretted over striking just the right balance. In a 2007 strategy session at a downtown Washington, D.C., hotel before a Democratic candidates’ debate at Howard University, Obama struggled to establish his own voice. “I can’t sound like Martin,” Obama said. “I can’t sound like Jesse.”7 Obama wanted to be himself while acknowledging the storied history that preceded him and made his candidacy possible. The dichotomy is something Obama has struggled with throughout his presidency. And it underlies an even narrower ledge: Obama has searched for the best way to talk about race without raising the ire of whites, but here his struggle has been less acute; he has worried little about losing black support.

  Soaring in Selma

  On occasion Obama has soared when speaking o
f race. Those of us who gathered under the surprisingly warm sun to listen to Obama’s speech in Selma were galvanized by his words at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the scene of the chaotic showdown between peaceful marchers and violent law enforcement. Obama brilliantly summed up black history in the span of a sentence, saying, “So much of our turbulent history—the stain of slavery and anguish of civil war; the yoke of segregation and tyranny of Jim Crow; the death of four little girls in Birmingham; and the dream of a Baptist preacher—all that history met on this bridge.”8 Obama celebrated the “courage of ordinary Americans willing to endure billy clubs and the chastening rod; tear gas and the trampling hoof; men and women who despite the gush of blood and splintered bone would stay true to their North Star and keep marching towards justice.”

  Obama even found humor in the interracial character of the struggle. “When the trumpet call sounded for more to join, the people came—black and white, young and old, Christian and Jew, waving the American flag and singing the same anthems full of faith and hope. A white newsman, Bill Plante, who covered the marches then and who is with us here today, quipped that the growing number of white people lowered the quality of the singing.” Peals of laughter mixed with applause. Obama insisted, too, that these men and women were patriots. Perhaps he was thinking of the hateful charge of disloyalty to his own country he had endured, the claim that he failed to be truly or fully American weighing on his chest as he inhaled the crisp Selma air and exhaled a ringing affirmation of the love of nation displayed by those folk on a bloody bridge fifty years before. “What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?”

  Obama defended the criticism of country as an act of love, one that fueled those American patriots long ago, an act every bit as important to the welfare of a nation that “is a constant work in progress” as the acts of those whose ardent support is more easily affirmed. “Loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths,” he said. “It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. That’s America.”

  A few moments after Obama encouraged patriotic disruption, I witnessed movement veteran Bernard Lafayette leave his VIP seat near me and Jesse Jackson and attend to a group of young black activists from Ferguson, Missouri, the self-titled Lost Voices Group, who were stationed outside our roped-off area and who sought to shake up the status quo and interrupt the president’s speech. The activists were beating a drum rhythmically and chanting “We want change, we want change” and “Black Lives Matter,” although they weren’t close enough to the stage to compete with the president’s richly amplified voice. One of the protesters complained to Lafayette that no one would listen to their demands; the elder statesman, in turn, empathized with the young people and told them that he had been arrested twenty-seven times during sixties protests, and had even been the target of an assassination plot during that time in Selma. After the activists fell silent, Obama’s words continued to echo through the adoring crowd.9

  The president linked his own success to the hard road traveled by the dusky patriots he had exhorted, noting how “the change these men and women wrought is visible here today in the presence of African Americans who run boardrooms, who sit on the bench, who serve in elected office from small towns to big cities; from the Congressional Black Caucus all the way to the Oval Office.” Obama brought full circle his initial appearance in Selma in 2007, when he was first running for the Oval Office, and the fulfillment of that promise in his presidency. Obama had come to Selma then as a candidate and defiantly refuted those who suggested that his African heritage kept him from sharing the civil rights legacy: “So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama. I’m here because somebody marched for our freedom. I’m here because y’all sacrificed for me. I stand on the shoulders of giants.”10

  Obama acknowledged in his second Selma speech the contemporary plagues that tarnished the legacy of that city—especially the rash of police brutality and killings of unarmed black folk. The president said that two temptations beckon us. The first is to say, on the one hand, that since Selma and the sixties nothing has changed. Obama acknowledged that the injustice of Ferguson, Missouri—where uprisings followed the death of an unarmed black youth, Michael Brown, at the hand of a white policeman, and where the Department of Justice found the city’s police department plagued by racism—was real, but that while it “may not be unique,” it is “no longer endemic. It’s no longer sanctioned by law or by custom. And before the Civil Rights Movement, it most surely was.” Of course, many would argue that deeply entrenched bias still reflects informal habits that have yet to be uprooted, even if they are not officially sanctioned, and that the repeated offenses of law enforcement against blacks and other minorities entail a violent bigotry that infects the systems of policing in our nation. On the other hand, Obama said, it is wrong to assume that an episode like Ferguson is “an isolated incident; that racism is banished; that the work that drew men and women to Selma is now complete.”

  Obama condemned efforts to weaken the Voting Rights Act that was Selma’s gift to black folk and the nation. “Right now, in 2015, fifty years after Selma, there are laws across this country designed to make it harder for people to vote. As we speak, more of such laws are being processed. Meanwhile, the Voting Rights Act, the culmination of so much blood, so much sweat and tears, the product of so much sacrifice in the face of wanton violence, the Voting Rights Act stands weakened, its future subject to political rancor.” Obama also praised young people in attendance and across the country: “You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, because you’re ready to seize what ought to be.”

  Trayvon Martin’s Trial, and Ours

  It was easily Obama’s best presidential speech on race at the time because of its eloquence, and, sadly, because there were few others to compare it to, even though he had by then been in office for six years. Obama often has been loath to lift his voice on race lest he be relegated to a black box, although his reluctance has kept the nation from his wisdom and starved black folk of the most visible interpreter of their story and plight, an interpreter who also carries the greatest political clout in the nation’s history. His radio silence often sent the wrong signal that race, and black concerns, did not count as much as other national priorities. A single event in 2012 smoked Obama out of his presidential cubbyhole of racial non-engagement and thrust him into his bully pulpit to, in part, define, and then defend, black people—really, to represent them, an extraordinary feat in itself. It was the epic grief that gripped black America with the not-guilty verdict in 2013 in the trial of self-styled neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, for the fatal shooting of black teen Trayvon Martin. That verdict, and the persistent injustice it highlighted, contrasted sharply with the narrative equating Obama’s ascent with the end of race in America.

  Obama spoke about Trayvon Martin to explain to white Americans why so many black folk were enraged over the verdict. Many white conservatives viewed Obama’s “one-sided” explanation of black suffering—a radical departure from the tough blows he had thrown black people’s way in most of his public pronouncements on blackness—as a surly betrayal of his racial agreement.11 Some whites believed that agreement was: do not speak much on race, and when you do, go after your own, and offer the blandest platitudes possible about the progress made and the racial work that remains to be done.12

  The most visible case of Obama being challenged to speak up for our most vulnerable black citizens—as a president should do for all citizens who suffer—occ
urred when he marched purposefully into the White House pressroom and offered an off-the-cuff, from-the-heart oration to the nation in the aftermath of the not-guilty verdict for George Zimmerman in July 2013. Until his 2015 Selma speech, it was Obama’s most extensive treatment of race since coming to office. Yet it was a speech made only after Obama’s written statement a few days earlier fell woefully short in calling for calm observance of the law in protests that greeted the verdict.13 The mounting disappointment finally squeezed him into interpreting black pain for the country’s benefit.

  Obama acknowledged that the verdict, a staple of our justice system, had been rendered, but still, he wanted to supply context to the outrage millions of black people felt at the jury’s decision. The president reminded the nation that when he first spoke about the killing of Trayvon Martin in March 2012, he’d said Trayvon could have been his son. Obama widened the reach of racial intimacy and got even more personal this time: “Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago.”14 The importance of Obama’s identifying with a young man whose memory had been soiled in cyberspace as a wanton thug who’d gotten what he had coming to him could not be overstated. Obama cast his fate with Trayvon’s and thus threw the enormous weight of his office behind the black teen from Florida. Trayvon Martin could have been profiled and killed at any point in our nation’s history, given our long bout with bigotry. But this youth’s death at this time meant something to a man who had been profiled since he’d won the presidency, a man who now looked at what might have been his younger self lying prostrate on the ground in Florida, until the difference between them disappeared.