Touré F. Reed, Black Agenda Report
- August 28, 2008 marks the 45th anniversary of the March on Washington. Forty-fifth anniversaries rarely garner the kind of attention reserved for their quarter and half-century counterparts. But as the Democratic Party prepares to nominate a black man as its presidential candidate on the anniversary of the march, the Obama campaign is doing its best to co-opt the rally’s legacy in its effort to reinforce the notion that the charismatic centrist black politician is operating in the tradition of civil rights leaders past.
To be sure, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) was right when he asserted in a recent New York Times Magazine interview that Obama’s successes offer a window onto just how far the nation and the Democratic Party have come since the 1963 rally. Still, as Obama attempts to play on the legacy of the march by accepting the nomination not at the convention hall but at Denver’s Mile High Stadium before an audience of 75,000 people, we should probably ask whether the black Democratic presidential nominee’s political approach is really in step with at least the spirit of the March on Washington.
