In the race: ‘Breakthrough’ of black politicians

Plus, Powell was not that impressed by all that “first black” stuff. When people marveled to him that he was the first, say, black Secretary of State, he thought to himself: “Is there a [first] white one somewhere?” This is not to say that Powell is not proud of his accomplishments, just weary (in that way so many “firsts” are) of being given primary credit for the life factor he had the least control over — his race.

Powell’s decision to remove himself from electoral politics was also a blow to the Republican Party, and one from which it has never quite recovered. When Oklahoma Congressman J.C. Watts left Congress in 2002, he was the last of the black Republicans there. By the time the 2008 election year arrived, not a single credible black Republican candidate was running for the House, the Senate or for governor in any of the 50 states.

Powell would not have been the first black candidate for President. That distinction belonged to Shirley Chisholm, the tart and bespectacled immigrants' daughter who, in 1968, was the first African-American woman elected to Congress.

Chisholm was ahead of her time, and — aside from their shared West Indian ancestry — unlike Powell in almost every way. She had chosen politics, not the military, as her path to public service. And she took pride in her reputation as a maverick, both in her Brooklyn district and on Capitol Hill.

Mavericks were not exactly welcome in the early years of black political power on Capitol Hill. When she decided to run for the Democratic nomination in 1972, other black elected officials, including members of Congress, were among her fiercest critics. In his book on the history of the Congressional Black Caucus, former Rep. William L. Clay Sr. called her candidacy “grandiose.” Ohio’s Louis Stokes called it an “ego trip.” Both men were elected to Congress on the same day in 1968 Chisholm was, but they were not close.

“No matter how unrealistic, she was entitled to her hallucinations,” Clay wrote. Ron Dellums, who initially endorsed Chisholm, switched to George McGovern, the eventual nominee. Chisholm’s candidacy appealed to some feminists and some African Americans, but she ultimately earned only 5 percent of the vote in the Democratic primaries.

L. Douglas Wilder, the former Virginia governor who is now the mayor of Richmond, launched his own almost unnoticed own nine-month run for the nomination in 1992. His effort was short-lived, and was marked by what turned into an unseemly feud with Jesse Jackson, who had himself run for President twice. Jackson did not feel Wilder was giving him his due; Wilder simply did not like Jackson.

But Jackson ran the most serious national campaign prior to Obama’s. In 1988, his second Presidential campaign, he managed to win 13 contests and 7 million votes.

The Jackson-Wilder feud is but one example of a more perilous straddle for black politics– negotiating the friction within the black community itself. It is one of the delicately untold stories of our time. The problem? No one wants to air the dirty laundry. When popular talk show host Tavis Smiley dared to air his criticisms of Obama early on in the Presidential race, many of his African American viewers and listeners turned on him in force.

Video   Politics, race and Barack Obama Jan. 19: Gwen Ifill, moderator of “Washington Week,” talks to TODAY’s Meredith Vieira about her new book, “The Breakthrough.” Today show

Still, this type of intraracial political friction is not as unusual as it may seem. When there are only so many ladders available to climb, the struggle to maintain one’s hold on any one rung can become intense. When thousands of activists descended on Jena, Louisiana, in 2008 to protest the imprisonment of six black teenagers, Jesse Jackson, Sr. made headlines by criticizing Obama him for not joining the march. Obama, Jackson told a reporter, was “acting white.” He later said he did not recall using those words, and released a statement reiterating his support for the Obama candidacy. But Jackson’s diffidence about Obama became a recurring theme, one he later said he came to regret even as he acknowledged the strain that began to build between the two Illinois politicians.

“It’s not a hostile tension necessarily, though it can be at times,” he told me months later. “There’s a creative tension that makes for change. You reshape iron when it’s hot.”

Al Sharpton — another black political lightning rod — played the 2008 Presidential race card differently. For a time, he played closet adviser to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, even saving their pleading calls on his cell phone to play them back for reporters. He laughs when people tell him the success of civil rights outsiders like Obama renders insiders like himself obsolete. That, he has said, would be like expecting soul singer James Brown to have made crooner Sammy Davis Jr. obsolete.

“I think white America wants to make us all one dimension,” he told me one morning over breakfast. “Okay, we’ve got one black at a time. Jesse had his day, Al was there, and then now Barack. But that ain’t how it is.”

Indeed, Sharpton is less troubled by Obama’s rise than some who believe the black community can only sustain one leader at a time might expect. The two held one very public meeting over fried shrimp at Sylvia’s, the famous Harlem soul food emporium, but Sharpton has enough self-awareness about his political radioactivity to stay mostly behind the scenes after that.

“I don’t think that white media gives white folks credit for having good sense,” Sharpton said. “They understand that a Barack Obama got to deal with me at some level. They just don’t want to see I’m controlling it. White folk ain’t crazy now.”

Sharpton acknowledges the difference between his approach and strategies developed by the new generation of black politicians banging their heads against the ceiling of power politics. They are almost all middle class, college-educated and comfortable in multiracial situations. They are not the 1960s stereotype of a civil rights leader.

When it comes to ambition, they take much from the Doug Wilders, the Jesse Jacksons and the Colin Powells. But they reject much as well. Like a ship maneuvering its way through a narrow channel, they embrace civil rights politics when it helps, and move past it when it does not.

“We are in the aftermath of a black freedom struggle that culminated, it ended in the 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan,” Eddie Glaude Jr., a professor of religion and African American Studies at Princeton told me. “We’re talking about a period, post-mass struggle. We’re talking about different conditions under which young people come of age politically.”

Excerpted from “The Breakthrough” by Gwen Ifill. Copyright (c) 2009. reprinted with permission from Random House.

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