The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  There facing us at the bottom of the other side, stood a sea of blue-helmeted, blue-uniformed Alabama state troopers, line after line of them, dozens of battle-ready lawmen stretched from one side of U.S. Highway 80 to the other.... On one side of the road I could see a crowd of about a hundred whites, laughing and hollering, waving Confederate flags.

  Hosea Williams looked down into the water and asked Lewis, "Can you swim?" He could not.

  Again, they started forward. As Lewis recalled, "The only sounds were our footsteps on the bridge and the snorting of a horse ahead of us." The troopers slipped gas masks over their heads. Behind them were many more white men; Clark had deputized volunteers from around Dallas County, a posse armed with whips and nightsticks. One even brandished a rubber hose wrapped with barbed wire.

  The officer in charge, Major John Cloud, told Lewis that the protesters made up an "unlawful assembly" that was "not conducive to the public safety." Cloud ordered Lewis and Williams to turn around and "go back to your church or to your homes."

  "May we have a word with the Major?" Williams asked.

  "There is no word to be had," Cloud said and gave them two minutes to disperse.

  Lewis knew that to advance would be too aggressive, to retreat impossible. And so he said to Hosea Williams, "We should kneel and pray."

  They turned around and passed the word. Hundreds got to their knees.

  But within sixty or seventy seconds of the order to disperse, Cloud lost his patience and ordered his men, "Troopers, advance!"

  Lewis remembered the terrible sound of the troopers approaching:

  The clunk of the troopers' heavy boots, the whoops of rebel yells from the white onlookers, the clip-clop of horses' hooves hitting the hard asphalt of the highway, the voice of a woman shouting, "Get 'em! Get the niggers!"

  And then they were upon us. The first of the troopers came over me, a large, husky man. Without a word, he swung his club against the left side of my head. I didn't feel any pain, just the thud of the blow, and my legs giving way. I raised an arm--a reflex motion--as I curled up in the "prayer for protection" position. And then the same trooper hit me again. And everything started to spin.

  I heard something that sounded like gunshots. And then a cloud of smoke rose all around us.

  Tear gas.

  I'd never experienced tear gas before. This, I would learn later, was a particularly toxic form called C-4, made to induce nausea.

  I began choking, coughing. I couldn't get air into my lungs. I felt as if I was taking my last breath. If there was ever a time in my life for me to panic, it should have been then. But I didn't. I remember how strangely calm I felt as I thought, This is it. People are going to die here. I'm going to die here.

  Dozens of demonstrators were carried off to Good Samaritan Hospital, the biggest black hospital in Selma. The rest retreated to Brown Chapel, running, stumbling, gasping for breath. Some stopped and tried to flush out their stinging eyes with water from puddles in the street. The police and the vigilantes kept chase until--and sometimes past--the church door. At First Baptist, a vigilante threw a teenaged protester through a church window. At Brown Chapel, the pews were filled with bleeding, weeping people.

  John Lewis had a fractured skull. His raincoat was splattered with mud and his own blood. But he was still conscious, and somehow moving. He refused to go to Good Samaritan and headed for Brown Chapel instead. Once inside, he stepped to the pulpit and said to his fellow demonstrators, "I don't know how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam. I don't see how he can send troops to the Congo. I don't see how he can send troops to Africa, and he can't send troops to Selma, Alabama."

  "Tell it!" the marchers shouted. "Go on!"

  "Next time we march," Lewis declared, "we may have to keep going when we get to Montgomery. We may have to go on to Washington."

  That night, at around 9 P.M. on the East Coast, ABC television broke into its broadcast of the film "Judgment at Nuremberg," for what the announcer called "a long film report of the assault on Highway 80." The ABC audience that night was huge--around forty-eight million--and the newscast lasted fifteen minutes before the film resumed.

  Bloody Sunday was likely the most important act of nonviolent resistance since 1930, when Mahatma Gandhi led seventy-eight other satyagrahis (truth-force activists) in a twenty-three-day march from his ashram to the coastal town of Dandi in protest against the British government and the colonial tax on salt. For millions of Americans, the sight of peaceful protesters being clubbed and gassed in Selma disturbed the foundations of American indifference no less than Gandhi inspired Indians and unnerved the British.

  On March 15th, before a joint session of Congress, President Johnson delivered the most ringing endorsement of civil rights ever by a sitting President. In his first twenty years in the House and Senate, from 1937 to 1957, Johnson had voted against all kinds of bills proposing to help blacks, including anti-lynching measures. As Robert Caro makes clear in his multivolume biography of Johnson, L.B.J. had been profoundly affected by his experience as a young man in Cotulla, Texas, teaching poor Mexican-American children, but it was only in the mid-fifties--when, as Caro writes, his "ambition and compassion were finally pointing in the same direction"--that he allowed himself to start working in behalf of civil rights. By 1965, the white supremacists in Congress were weak; Johnson had crushed Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election; the balance of power was shifting, making a bill possible. That night, Johnson said, "At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama." Johnson's Justice Department had drafted a bill two days before Bloody Sunday. He said that, even if the country could double its wealth and "conquer the stars," if it proved "unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation." The voting-rights act that he was introducing, he said, would prove insufficient if it allowed the country to relax in its pursuit of justice for the men and women whose forebears had come to America in slave ships:

  What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement, which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.

  Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

  Watching Johnson that night on television in Selma, King wept. Six days later, on March 21st, King, Lewis, and thousands of others set out from Brown Chapel on a peaceful march to Montgomery, the "Cradle of the Confederacy." When, five days later, they reached the capital and its government square, King spoke to the crowd as Governor Wallace peeked through the blinds of his office. King declared that segregation was "on its deathbed." Bombings, church fires, or the beating of clergymen would not deter them. "We are on the move now!" King said. And his aim, "our aim," was not to defeat or humiliate the white man, but, rather, to "win his friendship and understanding" and achieve a society "that can live with its conscience":

  I know you are asking today, "How long will it take?" ... I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long because truth pressed to the earth will rise again.

  How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.

  How long? Not long, because you shall reap what you sow....

  How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

  This last refrain became Barack Obama's favorite quotation. He was three when it was uttered. Over the years, Obama read the leading texts of the black liberation movement: the slave narratives; the speeches of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Malcolm X; the crucial court opinions of desegregation; John Lewis's memoir. Scenes of the m
ovement's most terrifying and triumphant moments--dogs tearing at marchers, King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, his assassination on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis--unspooled in his mind in "black and white," he said, exciting his imagination and deepening his longing for a firm identification with African-American community and history and for a sense of purpose in his life. Obama's racial identity was both provided and chosen; he pursued it, learned it. Surrounded by a loving white mother and sympathetic white grandparents, and raised mainly on a multicultural island where the one missing hue was his own, Obama had to claim that identity after willful study, observation, even presumption. On a visit to Chicago during law school, Obama, a friend noticed, was reading Parting the Waters, the first volume of Taylor Branch's magnificent history of the civil-rights movement. Only a few years earlier, he had endured a tumultuous inner struggle about his identity, but Obama nodded at the book and said with absolute confidence, "Yes, it's my story."

  In January, 2007, a month before Obama formally declared his candidacy for President, the polls indicated that Hillary Clinton had a firm hold on the African-American vote. At that time, not all African-Americans knew who Obama was; among those who did, many were either wary of another symbolic black candidacy, another Shirley Chisholm or Jesse Jackson, or loyal to the Clintons.

  African-Americans know that their votes are especially crucial in the nominating process. "The Negro potential for political power is now substantial," Dr. King wrote in 1963, in Why We Can't Wait. "In South Carolina, for example, the 10,000-vote margin that gave President Kennedy his victory in 1960 was the Negro vote.... Consider the political power that would be generated if the million Americans who marched in 1963 also put their energy directly into the electoral process." King's prediction, which preceded passage of the Voting Rights Act and the registration of many hundreds of thousands more black voters, became an axiom of Democratic Party politics.

  No one knew this calculus better than Bill Clinton. A white Southerner, Clinton had read black writers and had black friends--a sharp difference from nearly all of his predecessors. The syndicated black radio host Tom Joyner recalled how Clinton awarded Rosa Parks the Congressional Medal of Freedom in 1996, and, at the ceremony, Jessye Norman led the audience in "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the James Weldon Johnson hymn commonly known as the Negro national anthem. "Every living black dignitary was in the audience that great day and everyone stood and sang the first verse loudly and proudly," Joyner recalled. "As we got to the second verse, the singing got faint. Most of us left it up to Miss Norman, who had the words in front of her. The only person in the room who sang every word of every verse by heart was Bill Clinton. By the third verse, he and Jessye Norman were doing a duet."

  Writing in The New Yorker in 1998, in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the sanctimony parade that followed, Toni Morrison remarked that Bill Clinton, "white skin notwithstanding," had been the "first black president," a Southerner born poor, a "saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy," the first national leader to have a real affinity for and ease with African-American friends, churches, and communities.

  In January, according to a Washington Post/ABC poll, Hillary Clinton was ahead among African-Americans three to one. Obama had failed so far to win support from civil-rights leaders. There was a constant stream of negative talk in public forums and on the Internet, trash talk about his patriotism, his left-wing associations, how he'd been schooled and indoctrinated at an Indonesian madrassa. Some civil-rights leaders of the older generation, like Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton, who were worried about being surpassed by a new generation, betrayed their anxieties by trying to instruct Barack Obama on the question of genuine blackness. "Just because you are our color doesn't make you our kind," Sharpton said.

  Obama and his closest aides recalled that he had been in a similar position at the start of the Illinois Senate race in 2004, with many urban blacks more comfortable, at first, with machine politicians and many whites more comfortable with just about anyone but a black man with a foreign-sounding name that rhymed with the first name of the most notorious terrorist in the world. "We'd been in the same place before," David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, recalled. "But one of the most important things you face in a Presidential campaign is the fact that there is almost a year between the announcement and the first real contest, in the Iowa caucuses, and so you have a whole series of surrogate contests in the interim." Selma was the first of those surrogate contests.

  One week before the event, the Clinton campaign learned that Obama was speaking at Brown Chapel. They hurriedly made arrangements for Hillary Clinton to speak three blocks down the street, at First Baptist Church. Artur Davis, an African-American congressman from Alabama and a friend of Obama's, said that Hillary Clinton knew she had to come to Selma: "There was no better place than this stage to make a statement about her seriousness in contesting the black vote." The former President would come, too, and be inducted into the National Voting Rights Museum's "hall of fame."

  Bill Clinton was wise enough to know that in Selma Hillary could emerge from the day's news cycle with, at best, an undramatic, gaffe-less draw. He had been counseled to keep his remarks to a minimum in Selma lest he draw attention from his wife. When he and Hillary spoke side by side at the funeral of Coretta Scott King, in February, 2006, he had been masterly, heartfelt, as good, many felt, as any of the best black preachers in the pulpit that day. By comparison, Hillary, speaking just after him, was stiff, awkward, routine. When Bill Clinton read the comparative accounts of their speeches, he told me that he said to Hillary, "If we both spoke at the Wellesley reunion, you'd probably get a better reception. You can't pay any attention to this. This is my life. I grew up in these churches. I knew more people by their first name in that church than at the end of my freshman year. This is my life. You don't have to be better at this than me. You got to be better than whoever."

  At First Baptist, Hillary Clinton spoke earnestly and well. (Her husband did not attend the speech.) Her goal was to project the movement forward and to place herself within its mainstream. "After all the hard work getting rid of literacy tests and poll taxes, we've got to stay awake because we've got a march to continue," she said in her speech. "How can we rest while poverty and inequality continue to rise?"

  Clinton tied the history of Selma and civil rights to a narrative of American emancipation, generalizing its lessons and implications to include herself. The Voting Rights Act, she insisted, was a triumph for all men and women. "Today it is giving Senator Obama the chance to run for President," she said. "And, by its logic and spirit, it is giving the same chance to Governor Bill Richardson to run as a Hispanic. And, yes, it is giving me that chance, too." The writing was, at times, more convincing than the delivery, especially when Clinton, a daughter of northern Illinois, began dropping her "g"s and channeling her inner Blanche DuBois. Where had that accent come from? Some of Obama's black critics, especially those steeped in the church and the lineage of civil-rights-era speakers, said that he did not have a natural gift for the pulpit, either, that his attempts at combining the rhetoric of the sacred and the street--a traditional language of liberation and exhortation--sometimes sounded forced. But it took no expert to hear the extra effort in Clinton's voice. She was sincere, she was trying, but she did not win the day in Selma.

  At Brown Chapel, the pews were crammed with men and women who had either been present at Bloody Sunday or had arrived later to set out with Dr. King for Montgomery. Three of King's leading colleagues--John Lewis, C. T. Vivian, and Joseph Lowery--were there, sitting behind Obama. The Reverend Lowery, who was now eighty-five, and a reigning figure in the black churches of Atlanta, saw Obama as a kind of miracle. It could only be a miracle that white Americans, even white Southerners, were prepared at last to vote for a black man. How could he turn away from him? Lowery had also been an ardent supporter of Bill Clinton, in the nineties, but this political moment was different. Lowery had
lived through too much to hesitate when it came to Obama. In 1963, Lowery barely escaped the bombing of his hotel room in Birmingham. In 1979, Klansmen opened fire on him in Decatur, Alabama, when he was protesting the jailing of a black mentally retarded man who had been charged with raping a white woman. In Selma, he decided, "I had a candidate."

  The trouble was, Lowery damn near knocked that candidate off the stage at Brown Chapel. He came to the pulpit following Lewis's more stolid welcome; he walked gingerly, his voice was scratchy and strained, but he was wily, energized, his eyes full of mischief. In a way that seemed scattered at first, like the opening bars of a piece of avant-garde music that defy resolution, Lowery started talking about all the "crazy" things that had been happening lately--the craziness of him, a Methodist preacher, being in a Catholic church not long before, praying for the health of a Muslim preacher; the "craziness" of a Muslim congressman in church singing Christian hymns. Then the music, and the idea behind it, began to cohere:

  When Harriet Tubman would run up and down the underground, she was as crazy as she could be--but it was a good crazy. And when Paul preached to Agrippa, Agrippa said, "Paul, you're crazy." But it was a good crazy.

  And I'm saying today we need more folks in this country who've got a good crazy. You can't tell what will happen when you have the good crazy folks going to the polls to vote....