Un amplio reportaje multimedia de la revista The New Yorker a lo mejor de la historia reciente de los Estados Unidos: la lucha de los afroamericanos por los derechos civiles. Fé, música, teología, cultura, política, deportes. Memorable.
The PromiseFebruary 15, 2010
An interactive portfolio about the civil-rights era, with contemporary portraits by Platon, historical photographs, interviews, and audio commentary by David Remnick, whose written introduction appears below the portfolio.
A few weeks before his Inauguration, Barack Obama called the Reverend Joseph Lowery, Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s ally in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who was now eighty-seven years old. Obama left a message and asked him to call on his cell phone. Lowery had introduced Obama at the pulpit of Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, in Selma, Alabama, at a commemoration of Bloody Sunday, the 1965 march during which policemen clubbed and gassed hundreds of protesters. He had campaigned with Obama in Iowa and Georgia. Unlike some leaders of the civil-rights generation, Lowery had set aside his relationship with the Clintons and had been with Obama from the start. Returning Obama’s call, he said, “I am looking for the fellow who is going to be the forty-fourth President.”
“Well, I believe that would be me, Brother Lowery,” Obama replied.
When Obama asked him to give the benediction on January 20th, Lowery said, “Let me check my calendar.” Then, after a long pause, he said, “Hmm, I do believe I am free that day.” News of the honor spread quickly. Some of Lowery’s friends wanted to know why Rick Warren, an evangelical leader with conservative views on homosexuality, abortion, and stem-cell research, had been granted the honor of giving the invocation. “Don’t worry,” Lowery told them. “This way, I get the last word.”
Lowery sat near the Supreme Court Justices, shivering in the cold. (“They promised there would be heat.”) When his turn came to speak, he stepped slowly to the microphone; as he looked out at the crowd of almost two million on the Mall, he could see the monuments, blurry in the distance. For a second or two, he was overwhelmed by a kind of hallucination: “When you have eighty-seven-year-old eyes, there is always a haze. But the eyes of my soul at that moment could see the Lincoln Memorial and the ears of my soul could hear Martin’s voice on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial summoning the nation to move out of the low land of race and color to the higher ground of the content of our character. And I thought the nation had finally responded to the summons, nearly forty-six years later, by inaugurating a black man as the forty-fourth President of the United States.”
In a worn, growly whisper, Lowery began his benediction with James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Johnson, as the principal of a segregated school in Jacksonville, Florida, wrote the poem in 1900, in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. By the nineteen-twenties, the hymn, with music written by Johnson’s brother, was known as the black national anthem and was sung in black churches and schools as a form of protest against Jim Crow and to celebrate a faith in a higher American ideal. Standing a few feet from the first African-American President, Lowery read the final verse:
God of our weary years,God of our silent tears,Thou who has brought usthus far along the way,Thou who has by Thy mightled us into the light,Keep us forever in the path,we pray. . . .
For months, Lowery had been suffering from severe back and leg pain. His voice was not as strong as it was in Selma, when he helped ignite Obama’s campaign, but he had come prepared with a prayer crafted for the historical moment. In closing, he was both sly and full of feeling:
Lord, in the memory of all the saints, who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.
Obama, who had bowed his head in the posture of prayer, broke into a broad smile. Lowery claimed later that he was improvising on the familiar Sunday-school song “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” but the language he was playing with was really from an old saying taken up by Big Bill Broonzy’s blues lament “Black, Brown, and White.” The riff was a gesture both joyful and wary, a recognition of historic progress and a reminder that the day of post-racial utopia had yet to come. Still, some commentators, including Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, could see only anti-white malice in Lowery’s words. “Even at the Inauguration of a black President,” Beck said, “it seems white America is being called racist.”
Nearly a year later, a couple of weeks before the 2010 State of the Union address, I spoke with Obama in the Oval Office and asked about that day. “I have to tell you that you feel a little disembodied from it,” he said. “Never during that week did I somehow feel that this was a celebration of me and my accomplishments. I felt very much that it was a celebration of America and how far we had travelled. And that people were reaffirming our capacity to overcome all the old wounds and old divisions, but also new wounds and new divisions.”
In the matter of décor, Obama had altered the Oval Office only slightly. The Resolute desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to Rutherford B. Hayes, is still there; an antique grandfather clock still ticks the seconds, an unnervingly loud reminder to the occupant that the stay is brief. But Obama made one striking change. He returned a bust of Winston Churchill by the sculptor Jacob Epstein to the British government, which had lent it to George W. Bush as a gesture of solidarity after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and replaced it with busts of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.
The black freedom struggle defines the American experience. It is a struggle that has applied prolonged moral and political pressure to the promises of the Constitution and America’s self-conception. Its culminating drama was Southern, nonviolent, and religious, and centered largely on King and his times—from 1954 to his assassination, in 1968. But the struggle, which remains unfinished, is immensely more diverse and complicated than the schoolbook version. “One thing that I think the history books, and the media, have gotten very wrong is portraying the movement as Martin Luther King’s movement, when in fact it was a people’s movement,” Diane Nash, a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, said. “If people understood that it was ordinary people who did everything that needed to be done in the movement, instead of thinking, I wish we had a Martin Luther King now, they would ask, ‘What can I do?’ Idolizing just one person undermines the struggle.” Indeed, the struggle began with slave rebellions and fugitive churchmen; it has encompassed integrationists and nationalists, nonviolence and armed uprising, churchwomen and secular Third World liberationists, sharecroppers and intellectuals, heroes and eccentrics.
Many of the crucial leaders and foot soldiers of the civil-rights era, the movement’s postwar apogee, are gone––lost to age or martyred, like King, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and the four schoolgirls killed in the dynamiting of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, in 1963. But for the past three months the photographer Platon has travelled across the country in an attempt to honor at least some of the iconic figures of the movement, including a few who were just schoolchildren when they played their role in history. He reassembled old comrades: the nine students, now in their sixties and seventies, who, in 1957, integrated Central High School in Little Rock; surviving leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SNCC, and the Black Panthers; the daughters of Malcolm X. You’ll find a selection of Platon’s work, along with archival images from the civil-rights era and interviews with many of Platon’s subjects.
“The world is white no longer and it will never be white again,” James Baldwin wrote in 1953, and Obama’s Presidency is the latest embodiment of that truth. As a teen-ager coming to grips with his inheritances and his identity, Obama read the memoirs of Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Malcolm X (a tradition that he eventually joined, with his “Dreams from My Father”). As a college student, he went to hear Stokely Carmichael speak and Jesse Jackson debate. As a law professor, he assigned readings from Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I am a direct beneficiary of their sacrifice and their effort—my entire generation is,” Obama said. “There is a certain awe that I continue to hold when I consider the courage, tenacity, audacity of the civil-rights leaders of that time. They were so young. That’s what always amazes me. King was twenty-six when Montgomery starts.” He disavowed any comparison between their difficult and risk-fraught struggles and his political campaigns, saying, “They are related only in the sense that at the core of the civil-rights movement—even in the midst of anger, despair, Black Power, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, all that stuff—there is a voice that is best captured by King, which says that we, as African-Americans, are American, and that our story is America’s story, and that by perfecting our rights we perfect the Union—which is a very optimistic story, in the end.
“It’s fundamentally different from the story that many minority groups go through in other countries,” he continued. “There’s no equivalent, if you think about it, in many other countries—that sense that, through the deliverance of the least of these, the society as a whole is transformed for the better. And, in that sense, what I was trying to communicate is: we didn’t quite get there, but that journey continues.”
