In the race: ‘Breakthrough’ of black politicians

Superlawyer Vernon Jordan has more in common with West’s parents. He earned his civil rights bona fides running the Urban League and the United Negro College Fund, but he learned the ropes of the movement chauffeuring NAACP pioneer Roy Wilkins to and from meetings in Georgia in the 1960s. He identifies five distinct brands of black leadership. The grassroots activist. The corporate titan. The traditional civil rights organizer. The self-made entrepreneur. The elected official. These leaders range from CEOs to hip hop artists to mayors, and they do not necessarily represent a single world view.

“When we went across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, there was no guarantee we were all going to come out the same on the other side,” Jordan told me over lunch , figuratively invoking the lessons of 1965 Selma. “Clarence Thomas went across the Edmund Pettus Bridge too, but there was no guarantee we all would be alike. Because there have always been divisions in the community.”

There is yet a tougher question. Do all African Americans even want the same things? It is lazy and simple to lump them all together as a group that harbors the same grievances and aspirations. In fact, as a 2007 NPR/ Pew Research Center poll of more than 1,000 African Americans showed, African Americans are no monolith. Sixty-one percent said they saw more differences than similarities in the values of middle class and poor blacks.

The same Pew report also found that more than one-third of African Americans do not believe blacks cannot be thought of as a single race. The gulf, the report concluded, existed between middle-class and poor blacks. Interestingly enough, it was not a case of the bourgeoisie looking down its nose at the underclass. The survey showed poorer blacks were the ones more likely to see the existence of a gap between the poor and the middle class in what had come to be branded “family values.”

(Although conservatives had appropriated a term that came to be a politically loaded one, it turns out poor folks own the term too.)

Video   An intimate look at Obama’s ‘breakthrough’ Jan. 17: NBC’s Amy Robach sits down with Gwen Ifill, author of “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.” Today show

Perhaps African Americans have already reached a turning point, at least in theory. After all, Bill Cosby can sell Jell-o, Oprah Winfrey can sell books and Michael Jordan can sell Hanes underwear. Denzel Washington outranks Tom Hanks as America’s favorite movie star. Why shouldn’t black politicians be equally acceptable to the majority as well?

One of the things all these well-known names have in common is the ability to short-circuit white guilt. None of these popular figures seemed to be pointing fingers of blame. How could race still be a problem in America if white people could now identify with black entertainers and athletes? If Bill Cosby was welcome in their homes? No less a political figure than Republican Karl Rove made just such a point during Fox New election night coverage in 2008.

David Bositis, a researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, senses the mood has been shifting for decades, as access to the education afforded by civil rights advances — including desegregation and affirmative action — has created a new breed of black politician able to straddle the racial divide.

“You started seeing younger black elected officials who more and more had the profile of what more prominent white elected officials had,” he says. “If you look at a lot of the candidates for President, they went to Ivy League schools or law schools or business schools, and you started seeing that in black candidates. And those are the kind of credentials that white voters expect in the kind of people they are going to support for statewide office.”

Beginning in the early 1990s, Bositis’ Joint Center polling also began documenting a generational divide among black Americans that eventually began to drive a shift in political priorities. One-quarter of young black voters now describe themselves as conservatives and nearly a third as moderates. The remaining group, 48 percent, describe themselves as liberal. Fully two-thirds of them support arms-length solutions like school choice and the partial privatization of Social Security. Blacks over the age of 40, by contrast, oppose school vouchers.

Wasn’t this, after all, what Whitney Young and John Lewis and Barbara Jordan were reaching for? Is this not true diversity of thought, as well as action?

Colin Powell was, for a time, the prototype of a nontraditional political figure. He was already 58 and a much-decorated and admired retired general — years before the Iraq war sullied his reputation — when he was lured into a deep and serious flirtation with the Presidency in 1995.

His mulling gripped the political world — many of them white assignment editors who were convinced Powell would be the breakthrough. Reporters like me were sent on long-term political stakeout to divine his interest and intentions. While working for NBC that fall, I traveled all the way to London just to corner Powell in a BBC green room while he was on book tour.

The general, whom I then knew only slightly, was startled to see me, but not so caught off guard that he declared his candidacy to me. Powell wrote later that he was “desperately torn” about his decision, swayed alternately by pressure from Republicans, Democrats and independents. Everyone took turns trying to convince him he could be the candidate to transcend race, party and military leaning. He had, after all been the first black four-star general, the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Why not be the black Eisenhower as well?

That decision was left to his wife Alma, a sweet-natured but tough-minded military wife who possessed a will and instinct of steel. And that instinct told her it was not safe for her black husband, for any black man, to run for President. Not yet. When Powell ultimately announced his decision not to run at a packed news conference in a Washington hotel ballroom only months after the Powell-for-President frenzy began, Alma, standing by his side, looked only relieved.

Powell declared running for President would require “a calling that I do not yet hear.” But even as he stepped away, he seemed to sense the change in the air.

"In one generation, “ he declared, “we have moved from denying a black man service at a lunch counter, to elevating one to the highest military office in the nation and to being a serious contender for the Presidency." But in deciding not to run, Powell never tested the idea of whether the nation was, at that time, truly ready for a black Commander in Chief.

“The question lingered as to whether or not that would have been a serious problem or not,” he told me a dozen years later as we chatted in his post-retirement office in Alexandria, Virginia. “Many of my close friends and relatives said ‘Colin, don’t believe it. When they go in that booth, they’re not going to vote for a colored man.’”

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