by Joy-Ann Reid
It was a measured and eloquent statement, full of plain and simple truths, but the fires of Ferguson had already been lit, and the city was engulfed.
Jarvis DeBerry, a black columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, wrote after the president’s press conference: “Which elected official disappointed more black people Monday night? Bob McCulloch, the St. Louis County district attorney who announced that there would be no trial for the police officer who killed a black unarmed teenager? Or Barack Obama, black man and president of the United States, who awkwardly illustrated the difficulty of speaking as a black man while being president of the United States?”
By December, the country was seeing a scattering of protests under the Black Lives Matter banner, each one touched off by seemingly limitless incidents reminiscent of the Ferguson saga: a grand jury declining to indict a New York City police officer in the chokehold death of a forty-three-year-old black man, Eric Garner, whose final words, “I can’t breathe,” were captured on cell phone video; the police shooting of twenty-two-year-old John Crawford III as he held a toy gun in the aisle of an Ohio Wal-Mart; a Cleveland police officer gunning down twelve-year-old Tamir Rice just seconds after emerging from his cruiser in response to a 911 call claiming a “man” was pointing what turned out to be a toy gun on a community center playground; and the shooting of twenty-eight-year-old Akai Gurley in the darkened stairwell of the Pink Houses projects in Brooklyn by a startled rookie cop, whose first call was not for help for Gurley but rather to his union rep.
At the end of the month, when two New York police officers were assassinated by a deranged black man who claimed to be avenging Eric Garner and Michael Brown, Republicans, including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, blamed Barack Obama. Whenever protesters chanted angry, and in some cases vicious, slogans at police, Obama was to blame.
Ironically, Barack Obama, for whom a strict fealty to interracial conciliation had paved a path to power, and who had long avoided the fate of black politicians and civic leaders who became marginalized as nonviable for statewide or national office by diving headlong into the “race issue,” now joined Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Eric Holder in the pantheon of accused racial provocateurs, cited by their conservative detractors as the true cause of racial strife and division in America.
BETWEEN THE BEGINNING OF THE FERGUSON CONFLAGRATION and its dismal conclusion, the United States held another election in November 2014. When it was over, an electorate smaller than any since World War II had given Republicans the Senate, and with it, total control of Congress.
The election all but eliminated the “blue dogs”—the centrist Democrats who swept into the party in the late 1980s and ’90s with the goal of banishing the old New Dealers of the Johnson-to-Carter era. The Democratic Leadership Council had been shuttered since 2011. Two midterms had decimated the ranks of House Democratic moderates, who once had the power to force Nancy Pelosi to bargain on abortion to pass health care. In the Senate, southern Democrats were wiped out, conceding North Carolina and Arkansas, and in the ensuing wave giving up seats in Alaska, Montana, and Colorado, too, along with those of retiring stalwarts Tom Harkin in Iowa and Jay Rockefeller in West Virginia. Democrats failed to win the open Senate races in Georgia and South Dakota or to unseat Mitch McConnell in Kentucky.
In a final flourish, Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana senator from a family near synonymous with New Orleans, was defeated in a runoff, having reaped the whirlwind from Republicans for admitting in an interview that her state still struggles at times on matters of race. With her defeat, only one white Democrat remained in statewide office in the Deep South: Bill Nelson, senator from Florida and a former astronaut.
Democrats lost men, 58 to 42 percent, and white voters backed the GOP, 62 to 38 percent.
And while Democratic candidates received the lion’s share of African American votes, they had done so for the most part by running without—and in many cases in contravention to—President Obama, the person with the most powerful claim on black voters. The large share of black voters siding with Democrats meant little in the end, with fewer black voters showing up at the polls. And the drop-off in turnout among black voters was minuscule compared to the near collapse of support for Democrats from white voters in the South, where so much of the midterm’s Senate battles were fought.
It was a hard lesson for a party that in the South had been built in the modern era on a coalition of black party loyalists and blue-collar and rural white voters who remained culturally Democrats. It was the formula that propelled Jimmy Carter and then Bill Clinton to power. Now that coalition was gone. Much of the white part of that coalition had been slowly abandoning the party for decades. But Democrats themselves seemed to jettison what was left of it once Obama won the White House.
The party had once operated on a system of validation. It was what Lyndon Johnson gave to John F. Kennedy with southern white voters, and what Walter Mondale lent Jimmy Carter with northern liberals, and Joe Biden gave Barack Obama with working-class white voters in the Rust Belt in 2008 (and Rev. Sharpton gave to Obama with black ones). But by 2014, Democratic politicians in the South and West had all but abandoned the president, refusing to defend his policies and even pleading with the White House to keep him out of their states. In doing so, they gave what remained of persuadable white voters no reason to give Obama’s party a second look and black voters little incentive to turn out in droves.
In Kentucky, a state that had a Democratic governor and was a rare southern state in fully benefiting from the health-care law, Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, the challenger to Senate Republican leader McConnell, refused to even say in successive media interviews whether she voted for Obama in the previous election. Instead the Kentucky secretary of state declared her secrecy on whether she supported her party’s nominee for president “a matter of principle” regarding privacy at the ballot box, and pronounced herself a “Clinton Democrat.” It was emblematic of a party that, particularly in red states, wanted nothing to do with President Barack Obama, and that viewed the Clintons as the figures whom their voters—read “white voters”—could identify with.
The party that emerged from the elections of 2008 through 2014 was greatly changed from the one Lyndon Johnson had wrapped around the mantle of civil rights. Now the Democratic Party in the South was fundamentally a black party. What remained of white southern Democratic power was relegated to a few liberal white mayors, in heavily black cities like New Orleans and Columbus, Georgia, plus a smattering of city councilmembers. It was almost a given that white politicians in the southern state legislatures and congressional delegations were Republicans; any Democrats were nearly universally black. Redistricting locked in this formula, creating majority-white districts that only a Republican could win, and a small number of majority-black enclaves winnable only by a Democrat. Ironically, having fought, and in many cases bled and died to gain inclusion in the onetime party of the South, African Americans in the southern states now found themselves in full ownership of that party, but nearly as politically powerless as they were in 1964.
As of January 2015, no state in the Deep South except Arkansas had authorized the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, leaving nearly 5 million people, many black but also rural, white, and poor, uninsured. Two states in the “upper South”—Kentucky and West Virginia—had accepted Medicaid funding, though under Democratic governors. Tennessee was keeping the door ajar.
Though 2015 ushered in the largest Congressional Black Caucus class in history—with 46 members—they still had precious little power in the House, with its 246 members of the GOP (including one black Republican, Mia Love) and two African American senators, one Republican—Tim Scott of South Carolina—and one Democrat—Cory Booker of New Jersey.
In many ways, though, the president was set free by the election, and by no longer having to confront and accommodate the political fears of the “blue dogs.” He would show that liberation in some significant policy areas:
an historic opening to Cuba and a proposed nuclear deal with Iran; executive action to protect millions from deportation, and an aggressive posture toward the new, Republican Congress, exemplified in a defiant post-election press conference in which the president vowed to push forward with his agenda, with Congress’s cooperation when he could get it, or without it. “What I’m not going to do is just wait,” Obama said, addressing immigration reform. “I think it’s fair to say I’ve shown a lot of patience and tried to work on a bipartisan basis as much as possible, and I’m going to continue to do so. But in the meantime, let’s see what we can do lawfully through executive actions to improve the functioning of the system.” Newly elevated Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell described the press conference, and Obama’s aggressive tone toward Republicans, as akin to “waving a red flag in front of a bull.”
Obama had also been liberated to become more forthcoming on matters of race, speaking more freely and personally in interviews about his own experiences as a black man, though he had largely been unable to give black America the racial catharses it desired.
Eric Holder announced his resignation after the election, which set him free to wrap up federal investigations into the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson and Eric Garner’s chokehold death in Staten Island, while a grand jury continued to quietly probe the Trayvon Martin affair.
In many ways, and despite the vitriol directed at him by his opponents, Obama had lost the Congress and won the day. The economy was sound, gas prices low, and unemployment and job creation and the stock market at levels not seen since the Clinton years, though growing income inequality tainted those gains. Barack Obama was destined to be viewed as a highly consequential president, not just for his race but because of his accomplishments in health care, ending two deeply unpopular wars, expanding the rights of gays and lesbians, opening doors to immigrants, salvaging the U.S. auto industry, and shepherding the country back from the economic brink.
But much had been lost in the Obama years.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority had hobbled the Voting Rights Act—the law that made the eventual election of a black president possible. And the Court’s chief justice, John Roberts, couched the judicial repeal of one of the country’s most revolutionary acts of racial progress in the faulty conclusion that racism had been consigned to the distant past, and that President Barack Obama himself was the evidence.
The Fair Housing Act was thought to be hurtling toward a similar fate, as the Court’s conservative wing seemed determined to dismantle every pillar of the Johnson era, a goal long sought by conservatives, including some of the justices themselves. Antonin Scalia spoke scornfully from the bench about the Voting Rights Act, deriding its constant renewal over fifty years as little more than the enforcement of “racial entitlements.” Clarence Thomas, the Court’s lone black justice, believed the remaining core of the Voting Rights Act to be unconstitutional, period. And Thomas was known to have affixed a fifteen-cent price tag on his Yale Law School degree to denote his view of its true worth, having been “tainted” by affirmative action, a practice the Court invalidated in a 6–2 ruling upholding Michigan’s ban on affirmative action in its public universities and government contracting in 2014.
Outside the confines of Washington, the spirit of cross-racial unity that attended Obama’s election had been replaced by a deep pessimism and increased racial polarization. Black America’s hopes that with Obama’s election, the country would finally and fully confront its racial past, and white America’s wish that Obama’s rise would reduce or even remove the need to do so, had been equally dashed. Both liberals and conservatives looking for racial reconciliation in the election of the first black president were left unsatisfied. The country’s interracial mood felt tense, and raw, ready to explode with each new police shooting, every presidential pronouncement, and with every confrontation between congressional Republicans and the White House, over everything from the budget to foreign policy.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken in January 2015 found that few Americans believed that, to paraphrase Dr. King’s speech at the March on Washington, “America is a nation where people are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” A scant 27 percent of white Americans strongly agreed with that sentiment, as did an even more dismal 16 percent of African Americans and Hispanics, while 70 percent of African Americans, 55 percent of Hispanics, and 39 percent of whites disagreed with the rosy assessment of America’s racial progress. The country’s population was more diverse than it ever had been, and yet there was precious little cross-racial faith in our system of justice and our political processes.
Our political divisions were essentially racial, with increasingly multiracial Democrats and increasingly monolithically white Republicans holding polar views on everything, from whether a movie, 12 Years a Slave, should win an Academy Award (53 percent of Democrats versus 15 percent of Republicans saying it should) to whether disgraced NBA team owner Donald Sterling, caught on tape making racially inflammatory remarks, should be forced to sell his team (68 percent of Democrats saying he should versus 26 percent of Republicans).
AS PRESIDENT OBAMA AND HIS FAMILY STOOD ON THE EDMUND Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 2015, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” they were flanked by legends of the “heroic age” of civil rights: John Lewis; Amelia Boynton Robinson, who like Lewis was subjected to the baton blows of Sheriff Jim Clark’s troops fifty years before; nearly a hundred members of Congress, just a handful of them Republicans, including Tim Scott, South Carolina’s first black senator; his counterpart from Alabama, Jeff Sessions; one member of the Republican congressional leadership; former president George W. Bush, who signed the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, and his wife, Laura; and Rev. Al Sharpton.
More than forty thousand people descended on Selma, twice the population of the city, which fifty years after becoming a national pariah for its mistreatment of African Americans had fallen into economic despair. Selma’s population had been cut by a third, after decades of white flight. Just 2 percent of its public school students were white, and nearly every white child in Selma was enrolled in private school. Nearly 4 in 10 residents were living in poverty. The town was bursting to capacity with the influx of people from around the country, including many who’d marched over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, and who now looked back on that era in wonder at what they’d been bold enough to do, in many cases as teenagers or even as children.
The commemoration weekend brought civil rights pioneers to Selma: Diane Nash, Bob Moses and Andrew Young, C. T. Vivian, Dick Gregory along with the daughters of Lyndon Johnson and even the daughter of George Wallace, the descendants of Rev. James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, and Jimmie Lee Jackson, as well as Rev. Clark Olsen, a fellow white, Unitarian minister who was with Reeb when they and a third minister were beaten by white supremacists after having dinner at an integrated restaurant two days after Bloody Sunday, resulting in Reeb’s death. Bernard Lafayette, who as a young SNCC organizer took charge of the Selma voter registration campaign after the national leadership declared Selma to be hopeless, was there, too, as was Jawana Jackson, who was just five years old in 1964 and 1965 when her parents, Dr. Sullivan “Sully” Jackson, a black dentist, and his wife, Richie Jean, a teacher, housed “Uncle Martin” Luther King Jr. and Ralph Bunche at their corner home in Selma, a house preserved as if in amber, down to the beds where the two Nobel laureates slept and the yellow throw-covered living room chairs where the Jacksons and Dr. King watched Lyndon Johnson’s televised address announcing the Voting Rights Act.
Jesse Jackson came to Selma, too, as he did most years for the annual commemoration. But the well-worn and intractable rift with the White House, and a lesser-known breach with John Lewis over how to properly commemorate the events of 1965, had not healed. Jackson was featured prominently at events around Selma: on the second day of the bifurcated program organized by Representative Lewis a
nd his Washington, D.C.–based committee for the members of Congress and the president for Saturday, March 7, as well as by local organizers whose annual jubilee had for forty years been held on the first Sunday in March, which this year fell on March 8. But the onetime protégé of Dr. King watched the historic convergence of Selma’s tortured racial history and the country’s first black president from the crowd. When, after his speech, Obama, the congressional delegation, and the civil rights luminaries gathered to traverse the bridge, with their symbolic crossing captured in iconic photos splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the country, Jackson and his family had already returned to the St. James Hotel, the antebellum relic with delicate lattice balcony railings that was once occupied by Union troops during the Civil War, and that still stood along the fading main drag of historic downtown Selma.
But Jackson and the other civil rights veterans, who had weathered the movement’s darkest hours, hadn’t come to Selma to commune with the president. They’d come to hear him, in hopes that he would find the words to place the nation’s ugly racial past and its complicated present into a context that would bring most Americans into rare agreement. And this time, Barack Obama delivered.
Standing on the bridge emblazoned with the name of a notorious Ku Klux Klan leader, the looming iron edifice soaring above him, after being introduced by an emotional John Lewis, President Obama gave a speech that at long last lived up to the oratorical promise his supporters had long dreamed he would display as president.
Drawing from Dr. King but also from James Baldwin, and from biblical verse, the country’s first black president made the case for an America that is evolving, and that at its best has the courage to acknowledge that its evolution is not complete: