Building the Bridge: The King-Obama Journey, 1963-2008
By Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.
September 4, 2008
The choice now is clear. With his pick of Joe Biden as his running mate, Barack Obama sharpened the contrast with the policies of George Bush and John McCain that leave you on your own. With his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin, John McCain bowed to the will of the right wing of his party. Americans will have a profound choice of direction to make this November.
The challenge for Obama is clear. With Americans yearning for change, can he build the bridge--across our divides on race, on region, on religion, on ideology--and bring Americans together? The challenge for McCain is clear. Can he campaign as a “maverick” while his negative campaign is run by Karl Rove’s protégés, and his agenda is even more bellicose, more extreme on social issues, more dedicated to the failed ideas of trickle down economics?
Obama’s mission builds on the arc of American history. In his stunning address at Mile High Stadium on the forty-fifth anniversary of the march on Washington where Dr. King told America about his dream, Obama noted that “The men and women who gathered there could've heard many things. They could've heard words of anger and discord. They could've been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred. But what the people heard instead--people of every creed and color, from every walk of life--is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.”
When Dr. King delivered that speech, he was scarred and bloody from trying to knock down locked doors. He was maligned, attacked as an outside trouble maker, beaten, arrested, and denounced as too divisive and too extreme. The marchers came to a Washington where African Americans could not eat in most lunch counters. They came from a South where apartheid was still the law of the land. There was not one black athlete in a Southern college. Public accommodations were closed. The bombings in Birmingham were one month later. The battles over the Mississippi Democratic Party were one year later. The Voting Rights Act would not be passed for another two years.
Dr. King had no choice but to confront segregation if we were to change it. His genius was that he called upon his followers to have the courage of non-violence – even as he called them to protest and to demonstrate. And his victory was that the bloody sacrifice of those citizens finally touched the better angels of Americans across the country.
Forty-five years later, we have come a long way. Barack Obama walks through the doors that King fought to open and past the walls that King and his generation knocked down. And he challenges America to come together to build the bridge that will take us forward. At a time, when the divide between rich and poor, between corporate executive and working family, between America’s needs here at home and the costs of its misadventures abroad are greater than ever, Obama calls on us to come together: “We cannot walk alone,” the preacher cried, “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”
McCain, as his vice presidential choice Gov Palin reinforced, chooses to walk alone. The entire theme of his campaign is that he, as a lone maverick, will clean up Washington. It doesn’t matter that his campaign is staffed by lobbyists; his agenda more of the same Bush policies; his populism a recent invention. We are told to trust him. Governor Palin, in her youth and inexperience, only reinforces this message. She wasn’t chosen because she is ready to be president if McCain is incapacitated. She was chosen for her potential political appeal to women, and to reinforce the point she made when introduced to America for the first time: that McCain alone will clean up Washington.
The entire principle of the Obama campaign is that we can only change our direction if we come together, demand change, and stay mobilized to force it. The campaign, he says, isn’t about me; it is about you, about Americans creating their own history. McCain stands apart and tells us that we are on our own. Obama seeks to bring us together to redeem America’s promise. The choice is ours.
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