Is America ready for a Black president? America is ready, but it won't be a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement

Ebony, Jan, 2007 by Carol M. Swain

I believe America is ready to elect a Black president who has the attributes and the credentials to make our nation feel good about its trajectory and how far it has come. But the first successful Black president will not be a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton or any veteran activist of the Civil Rights Movement.

Such a candidate laden with heavy baggage would evoke too much White guilt, and he (or she) would be seen more as a "Black" candidate than one who happened to be Black. The first successful Black candidate will be a person like Barack Obama or Gen. Colin Powell, both of whom embody the hope of the American Dream. It will be a person who ascribes to the mainstream political and social values that place heavy emphasis on hard work and individual responsibility.

These examples are lighter-skinned offspring of foreign-born immigrants, but one could easily imagine that a Black American descendant of slaves with the right set of credentials could garner the heart and mind of a majority of the American public. The hard-core racist element that would oppose a Black man because he is a Black man is not sufficiently large enough to deny the nomination or election of the fight person.

The election of Deval Patrick as the first Black governor of Massachusetts from the same state that sent Edward Brooke to the Senate in the mid-1960s is significant. Moreover, Black candidates across the nation are winning victories in non-Black electorates. What matters more than race are money, connections and ideas. The more successful candidates will be rich themselves or have the ability to tap into big money from traditional party donors.

The 2006 election provided reasons for optimism. Some people have argued that the defeat of Harold Ford Jr. in his 2006 quest to become the first Black senator from the South since Reconstruction is evidence of the inability of a Black candidate to win votes from White voters. It is evidence of no such thing. The final vote in the Ford/Bob Corker race was 51 to 48 percent. What is remarkable is that Ford lost his bid by a mere 3 points in a Republican-leaning state. Despite the subtle injection of race into some of the campaign advertisements, Ford did well despite his youth and his singleness.

For the hard-core racist, his singleness raised the real possibility that Harold Ford could actually marry the daughter of one of these hard-core racists.