With a proven ability to organize and a mile-long list of e-mail contacts, many of Barack Obama’s supporters are wondering today whether that will be enough to pick up where Martin Luther King Jr. left off.
In 1967, having achieved his goal of desegregation in the South, King wrote a book describing what he knew to be a far more difficult struggle ahead.
“The practical cost of change for the nation up to this point has been cheap,” King wrote in “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”
“Jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls. The eradication of slums housing millions is complex far beyond integrating buses and lunch counters.”
One year later, King was dead. By the early 1970s, when Obama was still a young child, the once-mighty movement for racial integration in the South had fractured into localized interest groups lacking widely respected leaders.
Years later, as a college student, images of the civil rights movement “became a form of prayer for me,” Obama wrote in his 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”
“They told me that I wasn’t alone in my particular struggles, and that communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for blacks.” The idea of community organizing, he wrote, became “a promise of redemption.”
That ability to organize, developed in his young adulthood, was credited by many during the 2008 election cycle as the reason Obama won the presidency.
And now, many are waiting to see whether it can be used to further King’s dreams of racial equality, or whether it allows more opportunity for today’s young organizers.
“It’s not up to him to raise the profile of our agendas,” said Charles Lewis, a professor of social work at Howard University focused on helping young black men caught in the criminal justice system. “But Obama can provide us with an environment and an opportunity to create the change ourselves.”
