Rick Pearson, Baltimore Sun
- The Rev. Jesse Jackson says the anticipated nomination of Sen. Barack Obama as the Democratic presidential candidate represents a crowning achievement for the civil rights movement as well as an “I-told-you-so” moment in the history of race relations in the United States.
Jackson, appearing before the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune in advance of the annual Rainbow PUSH Coalition convention that begins Saturday, also said he was largely satisfied with the Democratic delegate selection system that was a key to the extended party nominating–a system Jackson was primarily responsible for in 1988.
Jackson called Obama’s nomination “the last lap of a 54-year marathon race” that began with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that separate was not equal in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, followed by the lessons learned from the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till and the inspiration of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington in 1963.
