Obama speech has special meaning for Southern delegates

ANA RADELAT, Gannett News Service

- Barack Obama’s bid for the White House made Seanta Clark, a former Republican, switch parties and become a Democratic activist.

A black delegate from South Carolina, Clark joined the Obama campaign in March of 2007, because she felt “Obama’s blood is my blood.”

“Instead of being African American, we can be American now,” Clark said. “This is a civil rights moment that gives us the groundwork for what’s to come.”

Obama has been careful to avoid allowing race to color his campaign. But Southern delegates from communities that have borne the brunt of the civil rights struggle can’t resist comparing Obama’s acceptance speech to another historic speech given 45 years ago on Aug. 28, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” address.

“Most people who have a sense of history think he’s going to invoke the memory of Martin Luther King,” said Joe Reed, a black delegate from Montgomery, Ala., of Obama’s acceptance speech on Thursday.

Deep South delegations, which are majority black, can’t avoid the emotional impact of helping to confirm the first black presidential nominee for a major party. In Louisiana, for example, 44 delegates are black, 31 are white and one is Asian.

“We have a sense of pride,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., a black lawmaker who, like Obama, was once a community activist.

The day of Obama’s speech is also the 55th anniversary of the murder of 14-year old Emmett Till in Money, Miss. Till was murdered because he had reportedly whistled at a white woman.

The then nascent civil rights movement was energized after Till’s mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket to show the world the brutality of the killing. Her son had been beaten, his eyes gouged out, then shot and thrown into the Tallahatchie River.

“A lot of us who can remember those incidents will look at Obama’s acceptance of the nomination as a deciding moment for the country,” Thompson said.

Aug. 28 also marks the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in 2005, which turned the world’s attention to the wrenching poverty that continues to mark the lives of many black Americans.

“I never thought it would happen in my lifetime,” said Lisa Ross, a 45-year-old black delegate from Mississippi. “(African Americans) are looking at this in a historical context and realizing the great strides we’re making.”

Southern Democratic delegations have become increasingly black as Southern whites shifted to the GOP in a movement that started as a protest against former President Johnson’s civil rights programs and blacks used their voting rights to register as Democrats.

Black delegates attending the Democratic National Convention here account for 24.4 percent of the 4,440 delegates who cast their votes for a nominee Wednesday. In 2004, blacks made up only 20.3 percent of the Democratic convention’s delegates. In 1984, they were 18 percent.

Obama’s early victory in South Carolina was based largely on the support of black voters. Subsequent victories in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi helped him defeat Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in their race for the nomination.

Because of the white flight from the Democratic Party in those states, Obama isn’t likely to win any of them in November.

Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and American white mother, is not a candidate of the civil rights mold.

But Reed said his fate is linked with those of Southern blacks at the convention, who became full participants in American politics because of the civil rights struggle.

“We’re all here in Denver as a result of the Selma march,” he said.