Dr steve lawson biography of barack obama

The political victory of Barack Obama on November 4, demonstrated the success of the civil rights movement and its legacies of minority political empowerment and ideology of toleration. A mere forty years before in , reactionaries had silenced the voices of such apostles of racial change as Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy who both promoted a vision of a multiracial “beloved community” that celebrated diversity and dreamed of an America where all citizens received political freedom and social equality. Indeed after assisting brother John F. Kennedy’s race for the white house, the new U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy suggested in that the country seemed to be “moving so fast in race relations that a black could be President in ‘30 or 40 years.’” In the intervening time, several African Americans had placed their names in nomination, Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, Alan Keyes. Yet it took the campaign of a post-Jim Crow candidate, raised in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, to successfully transcend the issue of race and attract a majority of the nation’s electorate. Winning the election with 52 percent of the vote, the nation’s first president of mixed-race ancestry, Barack Obama, who was raised in Hawaii and Indon

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