The Dream That Finally Came True

In the frenzy of the Obama Revolution, the phenomenon of Barack Obama’s election has swept America – but his triumph is the culmination of a long, tragic history. SPIEGEL ONLINE lists 20 moments which have created the America in which Obama could become President.

Did the USA’s highest Justice misspeak during the oath of office because the situation is so unprecedented? For the first time in 223 years, since the founding of the world’s oldest democracy, an African-American, not a white man, pledged to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States.

Obama handled the slip with nonchalance and a smile. On the Mall, the green strip in front of the Capitol in Washington, hundreds of thousands of Americans fought off tears, overwhelmed by the significance of the historical moment. In front of everyone, America entered a new era. And it was U.S. citizens of color, of course, who realized the momentous importance of this triumph especially profoundly.

Barack Obama’s move into the Oval Office signifies a new beginning: that a representative of the African-American minority was elected to the nation’s highest office by a majority of US citizens marks the close and climax of a historical struggle for freedom and civil rights. It is a struggle that lasted more than a century and a half, that led the nation into a bloody civil war, and that victimized thousands upon thousands. Eventually, this struggle cost many their lives—famous men like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but also largely unknown martyrs like Medgar Evers, who was shot dead in Mississippi in 1963 by a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Backtracking After the Abolition of Slavery

The first great martyr for the rights of blacks was a white man: Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States. After the secession of the Southern states and the outbreak of the civil war in 1861, it was the Republican Lincoln who declared, on September 22, 1862, the abolition of slavery, and declared the liberation of slaves as the Union’s official objective in the war. Lincoln won the civil war – but he paid for his position with his life shortly after the war’s end: on Good Friday, 1865, he was shot in the head by the radical Confederate John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater in Washington. Despite pouring rain, hundreds of blacks held a wake outside the White House for hours.

Lincoln’s successor’s swore the oath of office to a constitution that guaranteed Americans of color civil rights, including the right to vote. And, indeed, the first black members of Congress took office in 1870: Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels, sent by the state of Mississippi, and Representative Joseph Hayne Rainey, who was even directly elected by the people of South Carolina.

But just a few years later, Southern whites turned back their watches: blacks’ right to vote was eroded and segregation intensified. The policy of “separate but equal” was even sanctioned multiple times by the Supreme Court. Ku Klux Klan lynchings of blacks were a regular occurrence at the turn of the century. The “Jim Crow” laws, the foundation of segregation, stayed mostly in place until the middle of the 1960s. In 1966 a black man was once more elected to the US Senate: Edward Brooke from Massachusetts.

“I have a dream”

Exactly one hundred years after the Civil War that ended slavery, but not discrimination, US citizens of color fought to regain their rights – this time nonviolently. The Sixties saw the height of the American civil rights movement. Its weapons were civil disobedience, challenges to taboo, and provocation. The seamstress Rosa Parks, who on December 1, 1955 refused to give up her seat to a white person, became the movement’s icon. Parks ended up behind bars for her disobedience, but her stubbornness eventually paid off. After mass protests and a bus boycott, the Supreme Court struck down the discriminatory legislation.

And the example spread: blacks across the country demonstrated in places off-limits to them, waiting, for example, on service in a restaurant which displayed the sign “Whites only.” The protest spread through the black minority, uniting simple workers and great intellectuals. The Baptist preacher and gifted speaker Martin Luther King became the undisputed leader of the movement.

He was attacked several times, survived an attempted bombing, and wound up in prison dozens of times – yet he always praised nonviolence. His appearance at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963 became a legend: 250,000 whites and blacks heard his famous speech. “I have a dream,” declared King, that “one day the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will sit at the table of brotherhood.”

When Jesse Jackson Cried

For a while it appeared that his dream would become reality. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade discrimination on the basis of race, skin color, and religion. But in 1968 King was killed. Bloody disputes arose across the nation and the Black Panther movement marked the radicalization of the formerly nonviolent protest of blacks.

Barack Obama’s election seems to reconcile Americans with themselves, and to justify for black citizens the high price that they have paid for this progress. When the election results were announced on the night of November 4, 2008 and Obama declared himself the winner in his hometown of Chicago, TV cameras zoomed in on an old man in the audience. He held an American flag and had tears streaming down his face. It was Jesse Jackson, a companion of Martin Luther King and the voice of black America in the eighties.

Jackson campaigned for nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate twice, in 1984 and 1988, both times unsuccessfully. Now, twenty years later, Barack Obama fulfilled Jackson’s dream – and the dream of all of black America.