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Obama on road to be ‘King’
WSN Bureau
 The long wait is over. For the first time in its history, a nation
that began by discounting the votes of African Americans will have a
black man as a major party nominee. Barack Obama, the 46-year-old
first-term senator from
Illinois who effectively clinched the Democratic nomination Tuesday,
could not have escaped the issue of race if he had tried. Today, 143
years after a civil war left more than 600,000 Americans dead and 44
years after the civil rights movement was embedded into law, racial
divisions continue to manifest themselves in myriad ways.
No
one could look at this nation's college graduations, its prisons,
its corporate boardrooms, its most distressed neighborhoods or its
toniest suburbs without concluding that racial equality remains
elusive in
America. This nation's unease with race was apparent in the exit
polls with voters who acknowledged that they would be reluctant to
vote for an African American.
Obama's achievement does not mean
America has become colorblind. Rather, it reflects his remarkable
skill at modulating the discomfort by addressing it in a forthright,
thoughtful way – as he did in a Philadelphia speech that helped
defuse the inflammatory words of his longtime pastor and spiritual
adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Arriving from Chicago, the
46-year-old Illinois senator celebrated his new and historic status
as the Democrat's presumptive presidential nominee on the spot where
his Republican rival, John McCain, will accept his party's
nod this summer.
Obama, the first major party presidential nominee of color, in the
prepared text of his speech called his win "a defining moment" for
the nation. Even some of his longtime supporters seemed stunned by
the end of a campaign that has made Obama, an obscure state
legislator just four years ago, his party's standard- bearer.
"He has energized voters like I have not seen since the '60s," said
House Majority Whip James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat who
made his support for Obama official on Tuesday. "He has helped draw
a new map for the Democratic party." Had Dr. King were alive he
would say that his dream has been realized or on the way to being
achieved because of Senator Obama’s success story. How true.
4
June,
2008
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