(Dear Karthik,
The working conditions of the Blacks did not change on
the very morrow of earning voting rights.
But that in itself was a major gain, an erasure of an
ugly discrimination.
Then came the domino effect.
The situation is only comparable this time.
Of course, to my mind.
Sukla)
It is perhaps Lenin who had termed revolution as the
festival of the masses.
The three articles reproduced below by three different
authors describe the upsurge of hopes and spontaneous
mass festivities triggered by Obama election in the
US, particularly among the Black.
As regards leftist reactions to Obama election, the
http://socialistworker.org/2008/11/05/what-next-for-the-struggle
gives us a number of reactions from well-known Left
figures, mostly from the US, and also a few lesser
known activists.
All are unanimous in their assessments, either
explicit or implicit, of the election as a momentous
event. A watershed in history.
This is an explicit one: "Obama's victory marks a blow
against racism of similarly [i.e. similar to that of
earning voting rights] historic proportion. Despite
McCain's and Palin's best efforts to whip up racial
animosity toward Obama, they failed to garner a
majority of voters for their hate-filled campaign. To
be sure, the changing demographics of the U.S. voting
population has reduced the relative importance of the
white vote, while boosting that of Blacks, Latinos and
other immigrants."
All of them also agree upon the wide rift between the
hopes raised and actual possibilities that the
"system" may permit.
Most of them acknowledge the new opportunities opened.
One (activist) rather effusively puts it: "I think
most of us are walking around with a little bit of
knot in our stomachs, almost afraid to really hope
that this will come out a win. It's a scary time, but
at the same time, assuming Obama wins this election,
and they get a few more progressive members in the
House, I think our work is just only begun."
They do, however, seriously disagree on how to
approach this upsurge of hopes. This keen pining for
"change".
The two major strands are quite succinctly represented
by Mike Davis and Howard Zinn.
According to Mike:
Quote
Only three things, in my opinion, are highly likely:
First, there is no hope whatsoever of the spontaneous
generation of a new New Deal (or for that matter, of
Rooseveltian liberals) without the combustion of
massive social struggles.
Second, after the brief Woodstock of an Obama
inauguration, millions of hearts will be broken by the
administration's inability to manage mass bankruptcy
and unemployment, as well as end the wars in the
Middle East.
Third, the Bushites may be dead, but the hate-spewing
nativist Right (particularly the Lou Dobbs wing) is
well-positioned for a dramatic revival as neoliberal
solutions fail.
The great challenge to small bands of the left is to
anticipate this mass disillusionment, understanding
that our task is not "how to move Obama leftward," but
to salvage and reorganize shattered hopes. The
transitional program must be socialism itself.
Unquote
And this is how Zinn prescribes:
Quote
So it will take a revivified social movement to do for
Obama what the strikers and tenant organizers and
unemployed councils and agitators of the early 1930s
did for FDR, pushing him into new paths, so angering
the superrich that FDR, in one of his best moments,
said, "They hate me, and I welcome their hatred!"
Obama needs such fire. It is up to us, the
citizenry--and non-citizens too!--to ignite it.
Unquote
Sharon Smith puts essentially the same view even more
eloquently:
Quote
Although Roosevelt vaguely promised voters a "New
Deal," it took pressure from below to determine the
content of presidential policy during the Depression
era. The scale of the class struggle was such that
workers not only won the legal right to unionize and
other working-class reforms, but also tipped the
balance of class forces in favor of workers for
decades to come.
We have not seen a rise in class struggle for more
than three decades in the U.S. But the class anger on
display in this election could well be a prelude to
such a rise in coming years.
Obama has promised "change," but the scale of change
that is needed requires mass struggle from below.
Unquote
Tariq Ali echoes thus:
Quote
From day one of the Obama victory, which will unleash
a wave of high expectations on the domestic and global
fronts, activist pressure is crucial to achieve
anything. I think antiwar activists should turn up in
large numbers to the inauguration with banners
reading, "Congrats Barack, now out of Kabul and Iraq!"
Unquote
Highly relevant and insightful is the comment of a
prominent activist:
Quote
I think the Obama victory is going to help people
become organized in general and more involved. You do
not get this excited and optimistic about the future
just because the first African American is elected
president--you want to see this administration
succeed.
Therefore, you won't see people cast a vote and back
off. There will be significant organizing. If there is
such a thing as trickle-down, that is what's going to
trickle down.
Unquote
Another activist comments:
Quote
What we have to bear in mind always is that electing
one individual cannot possibly fix all the systems
that we need fixed. It's only a step toward perhaps a
more open government. I think this is the hope we all
have. But to think the election of Obama or a more
progressive Congress is going to immediately launch us
into a new dawn is just not realistic.
Unquote
There are a few others.
But the most percetive one, of course to my mind, is:
Quote
Lefties will have to fight for renewed political
relevance--largely absent in the current state--in the
form of such things as livable wages, the right to
organize, form unions and bargain collectively,
abolishing the death penalty, ending the murderous and
brutal war and occupation, releasing political
prisoners, acquiring single-payer universal health
care coverage--among too many others to mention at
this time.
These are the kinds of reforms needed in the near term
as we work for more fundamental structural changes, so
that people will one day own and control the
institutions that govern their lives in terms of their
workplaces and governing bodies.
With the advent of an Obama administration, lefties
should recognize that we will be organizing and
pushing for these initiatives among many optimists
satisfied with seeing the end of the terrible Bush
era.
Unquote
I, for one, could have not agreed more.
The prescription by Mike Davis to await the
(inevitable) disillusionment to set in looks pretty
ugly apart from being surely disastrous to me.
Sukla
I/III.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Watching-history-in-Harlem/381917
Watching history in Harlem
Sandipto Dasgupta Posted online: Nov 06, 2008 at 2326
hrs
After he saw Napoleon march into Prussia after the
Battle of Jena, an elated Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel wrote that he had seen history on horseback.
Barack Obama is no Napoleon, and I am certainly no
Hegel, but there is no way I can avoid the word
"history" when describing what I saw Tuesday night in
Harlem.
From around 5 in the evening, long before any of the
polls closed, people started gathering around the
massive television screen set up a stone's throw away
from the iconic Apollo Theatre, where such legends as
James Brown and Aretha Franklin were created. The mood
was at best one of tepid anticipation. Then, through
the night as state after state went Obama's way in
what could only be called a landslide, they broke
down, some in tears, some into a dance, and most in
disbelief. Some of them had endured the infamous Jim
Crow laws where they could not share the same seat in
the bus with white Americans or drink from the same
tap; some of them had faced the harsh end of an
extremely racialised criminal justice system (in New
York, for example, while African-Americans constitute
about 15 per cent of the population, they're nearly
half the imprisoned population). And almost all of
them knew their history.
They knew — as the governor of New York, David
Paterson, a young African-American himself, recounted
in an emotional speech — that their forefathers had
been brought into this country as chattel, a status
that was enshrined in the US constitution. They knew
that their grandparents did not really have the right
to vote until the '60s when the Voting Right Act was
passed. That they are still one of the worst-off
ethnic groups in the country. And then, at 11 o'clock,
when the results came in from California, they finally
believed that their country has a new president, and
that he is one of their own.
So Harlem took to the streets — singing, dancing,
playing drums, chanting "Yes we can" — ignoring both
the rains and the police who tried in vain to clear
the roads. Complete strangers were hugging each other,
saying "We did it." Drivers leaned out of their cars
to give high-fives to passers-by. People climbed atop
street lamps and bus-stops. New York, which famously
never sleeps or stops, came to a halt.
Make no mistake, this election does not in any way
close the chapter on racism in America. Neither does
it solve the persistent and prevalent inequality in
this country. But it is a moment whose significance
cannot in any way be minimised. Two men in the crowd
walking next to me shouted at a beggar on a street
corner: "Brother, you need not do that any more. We
have a Black president now." An old man outside a
famous jazz bar told me: "Today, Bob Marley is smiling
in his grave; today, Malcolm X is smiling in his
grave." D.L. Hughley, the well-known comedian, said
over the microphone: "To all the kids here, you need
not grow up only to be a rapper or a basketball
player. After today, you can also grow up to be the
most powerful man in the world." Yes, the beggar would
still have to be back on his street corner tomorrow,
and most of the kids in Harlem would perhaps have a
way better shot at being a rapper than coming anywhere
close to the presidency. Moreover, given the present
condition of America and the enormous weight of
expectation on him, President Obama is very likely to
disappoint some. But try telling that to the local
pastor who lead the crowd with the chant: "We are
free, we are free, we are free at last."
Americans are very fond of the phrase "Only in
America". Over the years it has become an empty
slogan, one associated with the jingoistic Right in
this country, and one that most of us non-Americans
view with justified cynicism. But today, those who
elected a black man, with a Muslim middle name, born
outside of privilege, as their president can be justly
proud of once again going boldly where no Western
nation has gone before (or even India — we haven't had
a Dalit prime minister). Tomorrow we can go back to
criticising the country for its role in the global
economic collapse or griping about its bankrupt
neo-conservative foreign policy. But tonight, at least
for tonight, we can raise a toast to the world's first
real modern democracy, as it dances in its streets.
The writer, a graduate student at Columbia University,
New York, has worked for the Obama campaign
II.
November 5, 2008
The Moment
A Time to Reap for Foot Soldiers of Civil Rights
By KEVIN SACK
ALBANY, Ga. — Rutha Mae Harris backed her silver Town
Car out of the driveway early Tuesday morning, pointed
it toward her polling place on Mercer Avenue and
started to sing.
"I'm going to vote like the spirit say vote," Miss
Harris chanted softly.
I'm going to vote like the spirit say vote,
I'm going to vote like the spirit say vote,
And if the spirit say vote I'm going to vote,
Oh Lord, I'm going to vote when the spirit say vote.
As a 21-year-old student (on right in photo), she had
bellowed that same freedom song at mass meetings at
Mount Zion Baptist Church back in 1961, the year
Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, a universe away. She
sang it again while marching on Albany's City Hall,
where she and other black students demanded the right
to vote, and in the cramped and filthy cells of the
city jail, which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
described as the worst he ever inhabited.
For those like Miss Harris who withstood jailings and
beatings and threats to their livelihoods, all because
they wanted to vote, the short drive to the polls on
Tuesday culminated a lifelong journey from a time that
is at once unrecognizable and eerily familiar here in
southwest Georgia. As they exited the voting booths,
some in wheelchairs, others with canes, these foot
soldiers of the civil rights movement could not
suppress either their jubilation or their astonishment
at having voted for an African-American for president
of the United States.
"They didn't give us our mule and our acre, but things
are better," Miss Harris, 67, said with a gratified
smile. "It's time to reap some of the harvest."
When Miss Harris arrived at the city gymnasium where
she votes, her 80-year-old friend Mamie L. Nelson
greeted her with a hug. "We marched, we sang and now
it's happening," Ms. Nelson said. "It's really a
feeling I cannot describe."
Many, like the Rev. Horace C. Boyd, who was then and
is now pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, viewed the
moment through the prism of biblical prophecy. If Dr.
King was the movement's Moses, doomed to die without
crossing the Jordan, it would fall to Mr. Obama to be
its Joshua, they said.
"King made the statement that he viewed the Promised
Land, won't get there, but somebody will get there,
and that day has dawned," said Mr. Boyd, 81, who
pushed his wife in a wheelchair to the polls late
Tuesday morning. "I'm glad that it has."
It was a day most never imagined that they would live
to see. From their vantage point amid the cotton
fields and pecan groves of Dougherty County, where the
movement for voting rights faced some of its most
determined resistance, the country simply did not seem
ready.
Yes, the world had changed in 47 years. At City Hall,
the offices once occupied by the segregationist mayor,
Asa D. Kelley Jr., and the police chief, Laurie
Pritchett, are now filled by Mayor Willie Adams and
Chief James Younger, both of whom are black. But much
in this black-majority city of 75,000 also seems the
same: neighborhoods remain starkly delineated by race,
blacks are still five times more likely than whites to
live in poverty and the public schools have so
resegregated that 9 of every 10 students are black.
Miss Harris, a retired special education teacher who
was jailed three times in 1961 and 1962, was so
convinced that Mr. Obama could not win white support
that she backed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the
primaries. "I just didn't feel it was time for a black
man, to be honest," she said. "But the Lord has
revealed to me that it is time for a change."
Late Tuesday night, when the networks declared Mr.
Obama the winner, Miss Harris could not hold back the
tears, the emotions of a lifetime released in a flood.
She shared a lengthy embrace with friends gathered at
the Obama headquarters, and then led the exultant
crowd in song.
"Glory, glory, hallelujah," she sang. After a prayer,
she joined the crowd in chanting, "Yes, we did!"
Among the things Miss Harris appreciates about Mr.
Obama is that even though he was in diapers while she
was in jail, he seems to respect what came before.
"He's of a different time and place, but he knows
whose shoulders he's standing on," she said.
When the movement came to Albany in 1961, fewer than
100 of Dougherty County's 20,000 black residents were
registered to vote, said the Rev. Charles M. Sherrod,
one of the first field workers sent here by the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Literacy
tests made a mockery of due process — Mr. Boyd
remembers being asked by a registrar how many bubbles
were in a bar of soap — and bosses made it clear to
black workers that registration might be incompatible
with continued employment.
Lucius Holloway Sr., 76, said he lost his job as a
post office custodian after he began registering
voters in neighboring Terrell County. He said he was
shunned by other blacks who hated him for the trouble
he incited.
Now Mr. Holloway is a member of the county commission,
and when he voted for Mr. Obama last week he said his
pride was overwhelming. "Thank you, Jesus, I lived to
see the fruit of my labor," he said.
The Albany movement spread with frenzied abandon after
the arrival of Mr. Sherrod and other voting-rights
organizers, and Dr. King devoted nearly a year to the
effort. The protests became known for the exuberant
songs that Miss Harris and others adapted from Negro
spirituals. (She would go on to become one of the
Freedom Singers, a group that traveled the country as
heralds for the civil rights movement.) In the jails,
the music helped while away time and soothe the soul,
just as they had in the fields a century before.
But the movement met its match in Albany's
recalcitrant white leaders, who filled the jails with
demonstrators while avoiding the kind of violence that
drew media outrage and federal intervention in other
civil rights battlegrounds. The energy gradually
drained from the protests, and Dr. King moved on to
Birmingham, counting Albany as a tactical failure.
Mr. Sherrod, 71, who settled in Albany and continues
to lead a civil rights group here, argues that the
movement succeeded; it simply took time. He said he
felt the weight of that history when he voted last
Thursday morning, after receiving radiation treatment
for his prostate cancer. He thought of the hundreds of
mass meetings, of the songs of hope and the sermons of
deliverance. "This is what we prayed for, this is what
we worked for," he said. "We have a legitimate chance
to be a democracy."
Over and again, the civil rights veterans drew direct
lines between their work and the colorblindness of Mr.
Obama's candidacy. But they emphasized that they did
not vote for him simply because of his race.
"I think he would make just as good a president as any
one of those whites ever made, that's what I think
about it," said 103-year-old Daisy Newsome, who
knocked on doors to register voters "until my hand was
sore," and was jailed in 1961 during a march that
started at Mount Zion Baptist. "It ain't because he's
black, because I've voted for the whites." She added,
"I know he can't be no worse than what there's done
been."
Mount Zion has now been preserved as a landmark,
attached to a new $4 million civil rights museum that
was financed through a voter-approved sales tax
increase. Across the street, Shiloh Baptist, founded
in 1888, still holds services in the sanctuary where
Dr. King preached at mass meetings.
Among those leading Sunday's worship was the associate
pastor, Henry L. Mathis, 53, a former city
commissioner whose grandmother was a movement
stalwart. He could not let the moment pass without
looking back.
"We are standing on Jordan's stony banks, and we're
casting a wishful eye to Canaan's fair and happy
land," Mr. Mathis preached. "We sang through the years
that we shall overcome, but our Father, our God, we
pray now that you show that we have overcome."
III.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Race_to_equality/articleshow/3679439.cms
Race to equality
6 Nov 2008, 0438 hrs IST, Subodh Varma, TNN
Which doll do you like, black or white? Back in 1939,
when psychologist couple Kenneth and Mamie Clark
showed black and white dolls to children across
American cities, they came up with shocking results.
Most children chose the lighter coloured dolls,
describing them as "good" and the dark as "bad",
showing the way racial prejudices got ingrained so
early in life. These "doll experiments" became a
famous argument against segregation in schools. Almost
70 years later, Barack Obama's victory in the US
presidential elections has redeemed the people of
America. Centuries-old walls of racial discrimination
and prejudice have been broken.
To understand the enormity of this, one will have to
look back at over 350 years of discrimination and
violence. Between 1650 and 1800, 6.6 million African
people were forcibly brought to America and the
Caribbeans to work as slaves in cotton and fruit
plantations. After slavery was outlawed in Europe, a
fierce civil war was fought out in the United States
between those who wanted to continue this barbaric
practice, and those who wanted to abolish it.
Slavery might have died after the civil war of 1863,
but discrimination, and violence, against the colored
people — newly liberated slaves — continued. Several
southern states enacted the oppressive Jim Crow laws,
which prevented blacks from getting educated, ensured
segregation in public life and treated them as second
class citizens. Violence continued, often through such
macabre organizations as the Ku Klux Klan.
This led to massive migration of black families into
the cities of the north where they started working in
factories. The biggest migration occurred during the
First World War, even as 350,000 blacks were fighting
in Europe, in blacks-only units. Even in the north,
they were subject to violence as whites thought that
they were grabbing their jobs.
There was complete segregation in schools, residential
colonies, restaurants, buses, restrooms — everywhere.
In most southern states, blacks couldn't vote due to
property and educational conditions. As a reaction to
this, the '50s and '60s saw a huge upsurge of protest.
Thousands of blacks, supported by progressive whites,
took to the streets demanding integrated schools,
voting rights, equal pay, and, above all, respect as
human beings. This tumultuous period threw up iconic
leaders like Martin Luther King Jr, and later, the
more militant Malcolm X.
In the '60s, the civil rights movement converged with
the anti-Vietnam war movement, symbolised by the
conversion of Cassius Clay to Muhammed Ali, and his
refusal to accept the draft for Vietnam.
There was a huge white backlash to this demand for a
better deal for the blacks. Race riots erupted in 110
cities, TV showed hair-raising scenes of police dogs
attacking black protestors, the National Guard was
deployed in scores of towns, and several black
leaders, including Martin Luther King, were
assassinated.
Yet the massive public protest, the biggest upsurge
ever seen in the US, forced the government to make
several changes in laws, helped along by decisions of
the courts. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed
by Congress establishing equality before law. In 1965,
the Voting Rights Act was passed giving equal voting
rights to all, irrespective of the colour of their
skin, and in 1967, the Supreme Court made laws banning
interracial marriage illegal.
Even in post '60s America, blacks continue to be
poorer than whites. In 1975, mean per capita annual
income was $16,111 for whites and $10,401 for blacks.
The number of black families below the poverty line
was four times more than white families. Not much has
changed since then. In 2005, the mean annual income of
white persons was $76,546, but the blacks were still
far behind at $48,606. Nearly a quarter of black
families still live below the poverty line.
Barack Obama was a young boy in that tumultuous decade
of the '60s. More importantly, he was not living in
mainland America — he was being schooled in Hawaii and
Indonesia. By the time he returned to the US and
joined Harvard, much of the battle was over. And, he
hardly had any contact with his black father who had
separated from his mother when Barack was just two.
So, though Barack may not carry within him the fire of
Martin Luther King, his victory is still historic. It
represents the biggest ever recognition given to
blacks.
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