African-Americans Glimpse ‘Promised Land’
US: At once weeping and jubilant, African-Americans glimpsed the
Promised Land yesterday, 40 years after the assassination of Martin
Luther King Jr., as Barack Obama won election as the first black
American president.
“I feel like 100 pounds are off my shoulders right now,” said Preston
Johnson, a 22-year-old African-American among the thousands of
multi-ethnic Obama supporters gathered tonight in Harlem. “I feel the
change right this minute.” Nearby, Tejahn Rahman, 25, said an Obama
presidency means that “the younger generation sees they can do better
than what we’ve done.
I’ve got chills down my spine.” At 47, Obama is too young to have
borne the battle scars of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but he
was the beneficiary of all its prizes: the Voting Rights Act, legal
acceptance of interracial marriage and affirmative action, among them.
“Change takes time, and to come to this place in time is a sign,”
King’s 81-year-old sister, Christine King Farris, told ABCNews.com from
her office at Spelman College, where she is a professor.
“This takes me back to my brother’s last speech in Memphis,” she
said.
“He said, ‘I may not get there with you,’ but we — not some
Americans, but all Americans — will get to the Promised Land.”
Amid dancing, confetti and champaign toasts, thousands of supporters
lined 125th Street in historic Harlem in New York City — the iconic
heart of black America and home to early civil rights activists Marcus
Garvey, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell and black separatist Malcolm X, who
was assassinated here in 1965.
The event, sandwiched between the Apollo Theater, where blues and
jazz greats once got their start, and the big-box stores like H&M that
have symbolized Harlem’s economic renaissance, drew an estimated 8,000
this evening, according to security officials.
On a stage lined with American flags, guitarist GQ belted out a
rendition of Marvin Gaye’s, “What’s Going On?” Throngs of
African-Americans, surrounded by tourists, European and American news
teams, answered, “Obama!”
But Obama’s victory is more than symbolism, according to Rainbow
Coalition director the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who spoke to ABCNews.com by
phone from Chicago on Election Day.
“For blacks who voted for Obama, this is reconciliation, for whites,
it is redemption,” said Jackson, who worked side-by-side with King and
later ran unsuccessful presidential campaigns as a Democrat in 1984 and
1988.
Obama’s ascendancy was accomplished by the civil rights movement,
Jackson said.
“That is the force that made his victory possible,” he added.
“His accomplishment came from the pain of martyrs.”
Perhaps a kind of poetic justice, but Kansas, where Obama was partly
raised, was also where the pivotal Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board
of Education desegregated education in 1954. ABC |