Delivered by Dr Arnold Rampersad At the 2008 Florida International University Dr. Eric E. Williams Memorial Lecture

It is a cherished honor to have been invited by Erica Williams Connell to deliver this address on the occasion of the tenth annual Eric E. Williams lecture at this university.

Let me point out at once, incidentally, that my lecture tonight, at Erica Williams Connell’s specific request, is identical in many places and respects to a speech I gave earlier this year in Trinidad.

That address was also in honor of the memory of Dr. Williams, and it was

given at the behest of the Central Bank of Trinidad & Tobago at its headquarters in Port of Spain, which has sponsored such a lecture annually for more than 20 years.

(Because much has happened since my lecture in Trinidad, and because the U.S. presidential election is only days away, I have modified some of the remarks I made on that occasion.)

Let me also assert the fact that because Dr. Williams meant so much to me

when I was a schoolboy, and he was beginning his historic project of leading Trinidad & Tobago out of colonialism and into independence, these two or even twinned requests coming in one year is something that I will value for the rest of my life.

Dr. Williams’ combination of deep scholarly learning, farsighted political and cultural vision, eloquence, wit, and profound compassion for the lives of the ordinary citizens of his country, left an indelible mark on my own values, and for that I will always be in hid debt.

My epigraph tonight, “The Negro is America’s metaphor,” comes from the black

American novelist and social critic Richard Wright, the author of the landmark novel of 1940 Native Son, about racism in America, and the equally significant autobiography Black Boy, published in 1945. (Wright died in 1960.)

It is the last sentence in one of the pieces in his powerful collection of essays, appearing first in 1957, entitled What Man, Listen!

I think Wright meant to suggest with this remark that as black American culture

goes, so goes the American nation as a whole.

If one wishes to know the state of the American soul, one should look deeply into whatever is the current African-American reality—how blacks are being treated by America as a whole, how their culture is manifesting itself, how brightly or dimly their future seems to be.

In the context of this moment, a few days before the presidential election, in which a black man is featured so prominently for the first time, it might be said with some accuracy that America could be the world’s metaphor, so avidly involved does the whole world appear to be in the outcome of this national election.

Now, the main question that concerns me this evening, a question I naturally hope

will interest you, is not whether Obama will win the presidency—no matter how

fervently many of us hope he will win—but how it came to pass that the majority of the citizens, with its long history of racist behavior rooted in the notion of white supremacy, came to what a short while ago was unthinkable—that this majority would seriously consider electing a crinkly-haired, brown-skinned, half-African man to be its supreme leader.

No matter the outcome on November 4, how did the mainly rural, overwhelmingly white state of Iowa come to launch so dramatic a change with its Democratic Party presidential primary, and how did the nation as a whole come to

embrace this shocking initiative taken by the Democrats of Iowa?

Obviously no one can answer these questions definitively.

I want here merely to try to fashion possible answers, the better to understand the mystery—to me—that is the emergence of the Obama phenomenon.

Had I sufficient time, I would try to answer questions such as the following:

Where did these whites come from, those who are now supporting Obama in such vast numbers?

Were there signs in the deep American past that we were ignoring or overlooking that might have alerted us to their presence?

And long before Obama, in the dim recesses of our American history, were there specific black men or women who plausibly might have aspired to positions of national leadership?

What were some of the main devices or instruments that blacks used covertly, what secret passages did they explore, to infiltrate and subvert white American power and thus make this Obama moment possible?

Were there signposts along the way of American history that might have told us that a man like Barack Obama could or would one day come upon the scene

to turn our world upside down, so that what most of us once thought—up to less than a year ago!—we would never see in our lifetimes, now hovers on the near horizon, so close at hand that we can almost taste what for many of us would be its ineffable sweetness?

American history has not been particular sweet to black people.

Around 1900, the scholar and intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois ruefully, fatalistically, described the American Negro (his term) as “a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no [true] selfconsciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”

He went further: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

In this same context Du Bois made his celebrated prediction that “The Problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the Color Line.”

About the same time, too, Du Bois looked critically at American whites and saw in their typical attitude to the blacks around them the belief on their part that, as he sardonically put it, “somewhere between man and cattle God created

a tertium quid, and called it Negro.”

Du Bois certainly never expected to live to see a black American president.

You will recall that one of the last acts in his long life, which ended in 1963, was to renounce his American citizenship and move to Africa.

Well, the exhilarating Obama phenomenon has made it clear that something

fundamental has changed since 1900. Of course, many if not most blacks care far less now than blacks did in 1900 about what whites think of them as a people—although it would be transparently false racial bravado, for the most part, to think that black double consciousness is utterly a thing of the past.

Secondly, with the arrival of Obama and his millions of white supporters, blacks now know that “in the eyes of others”—that is, in the eyes of perhaps the majority of whites, they are not all looked upon with “amused contempt and pity.”

That day is gone.

The world is different when a black man is so close to taking possession of the White House, and when so many American whites, figuratively speaking, seem only too eager to help him and his family with their momentous move.

It wasn’t always so, to say the least.

The Declaration of Independence in 1776 had gloriously asserted that “all men are created equal,” and possess “inalienable rights,” including the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

But Article One, Section Two of the new U.S. Constitution applied the brakes in the form of the devilishly clever “Three-Fifths Compromise.”

For the purposes of taxation and representation, according to the new constitution, the population of each state would be determined “by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term

of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

Thus the Northern states sought to hold in check the Southern states, where more than ninety percent of blacks resided.

By 1807, abolishing the slave trade was relatively easy as a course of action for

American and British whites; but abolishing slavery itself was not—and the nation

plunged into a deepening crisis. The Missouri Compromise was intended to limit the spread of slavery into newly formed states, but the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 radically tilted the scales of justice against blacks, slave and free.

In 1857, in its majority ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a profound insult to blacks.

In finding against black Dred Scott, the Chief Justice declared infamously that the Founding Fathers undoubtedly believed that blacks could never be citizens of the United States.

Indeed, Justice Taney wrote, those wise men knew that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Thus, “the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”

Needless to say, the matter did not end there.

There were whites and blacks to whom slavery was intolerable, and even whites and blacks who believed in the intrinsic moral dignity of blacks.

The Civil War, still the most deadly war by far in American history, began.

In 1863, Lincoln abolished slavery in most of the United States.

In 1865 the South surrendered. Until 1876, Union forces controlled the South.

When the last Union soldiers withdrew, the resurgence of white supremacy

intensified.

Twenty years later, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision Plessy v. Ferguson.

This decision held (in a case involving seats on a passenger train) that the practice of “separate but equal” accommodations for blacks and whites in railway transport—and, by inference, elsewhere, was just and constitutional.

Fifty-eight years would pass before the Court essentially reversed this decision.

When it did so, in 1954 in the ruling entitled Brown v. Board of Education [of Topeka, Kansas], the resuscitation of the ideal of justice for blacks, and of the idea of blacks possessing the capacity to rise in American society in keeping with their God-given potential, would begin.

In other words, until 1954, there could be no Obama in America even in theory.

And surely after 1954, until now, he was at best a figment of our imagination, as men and women of color dreamed about seeing themselves as full citizens of the nation, able to aspire to the highest office in the land.

Did a substantial number of white Americans ever indicate a commitment (in a

kind of intimation of the coming of Obama) to the idea of the rich humanity of blacks?

The answer is yes—but it must be remembered that white opposition to slavery and white acceptance of blacks as social equals were typically opposed ideas.

The American abolitionist movement, whether or not it always mirrored a genuine respect for blacks, gathered strength only slowly, through the production of propagandistic oratory, journalism, essays, novels, poems, demonstrations, and the like.

To be sure, there were genuine white radicals who hated slavery and also deeply respected blacks.

One fringe of the abolitionist movement, fired by spiritual zeal, even argued the notion of the Christlike natural moral superiority of blacks to whites, because blacks seemed so often to endure their suffering with a kind of super-human dignity.

Whites did not lack bravery, as when William Lloyd Garrison launched the antislavery newspaper Liberator in 1831 with these resounding words: “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch.

AND I WILL BE HEARD.”

And then there was John Brown.

In 1859, Brown led a band of armed followers, black and white, in an attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Several men were killed in the attack, which was repulsed.

Brown himself was tried and hanged. But his actions moved the country further along on the road to the ultimate confrontation between North and South.

But even Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a

book that did more than any other to bring on the Civil War, saw blacks as basically unassimilable, and best served by removal to Africa.

(Distinguished European-born men of color such as Alexandre Dumas, father and son, of France, or Alexander Pushkin, the national poet of Russia, all known to be of “colored” ancestry, would have had been pushed to the margins in the United States, and have their artistic promise distorted into protest and propaganda.)

But were there any American blacks of this era who might be seen, even in a token way, as prototypes of Barack Obama?

The answer is yes—men, and women too.

But in an age when women could not vote, the emphasis here must be on men.

Three stand out as objects of very high regard in the eyes of whites—some whites—and blacks alike.

I refer to Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), John Mercer Langston (1829-1897), and Booker T. Washington (1856-1915).

Interestingly, each one (like Barack Obama) was the child of an interracial union, although each had a white man as father and a slave or former slave woman as mother.

And each life is of genuine value in weighing the reputation of blacks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

John Mercer Langston, who was the grand-uncle of the poet Langston Hughes, is

interesting here as a kind of proto-Obama—but doomed.

The son of an emancipated slave woman of black and Indian ancestry and a wealthy white Virginia planter who left his money to their children, Langston became a graduate of the mainly white Oberlin College, a lawyer, an abolitionist, a recruiter of black soldiers for the Union armies, the organizer and first dean of the law school at Howard University, and even U.S. consul general to Haiti for eight years.

Then, in 1888, he ran for Congress in a mainly black district against a white Democrat and a white Republican. Langston won—but white Democrats (the Democratic Party dominated the white South) fought the decision for the

first eighteen months of the usual two-year term.

Eventually he served a few months in Congress, but was defeated, most likely by more white Democratic Party trickery, when he ran for reelection.

He retired from public life, and died in 1897.

The previous year, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its infamous

decision Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

If any single court decision undid the progress made because of the Civil War, it was Plessy v. Ferguson, when the court ruled that separate but equal facilities—that is, racial segregation of Jim Crow—was permitted by the U.S. Constitution.

White Southerners and their northern counterparts could show their hatred of and contempt for blacks in various ways, notably the terrorist practice of

lynching.

In response, blacks began the Great Migration, mainly to the largest cities in

the North, with New York a particular favorite.

From the Caribbean came key figures with the most spectacular of all, of course, being Marcus Garvey, with his “Back to Africa” movement.

Among native-born Americans, W.E.B. Du Bois of the new NAACP flailed away at racial injustice as editor of the Crisis magazine.

A. Philip Randolph would organize blacks in the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and make history by finally winning recognition as a legitimate trade union.

But the important point is that not one black man or woman in this era had the ghost of a chance of being accepted as a potential leader by whites, who tried to make sure that black scholars and intellectuals, men and women with broad cultural vision who might possess the ability to be national political leaders, were shunned.

This surely exacted a painful toll on the morale of a variety of scholars, educators, and artists at places such as Howard, Fisk, and Spelman.

Mary McLeod Bethune, the indomitable founder of Bethune-Cookman College

in Florida and the leader of organized black women in America, was allowed a small measure of political influence because of the liberalism of Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Roosevelt); but almost everyone else was locked down.

One such individual was Dr. Williams himself. Starting in 1939, a year after earned hid doctorate at Oxford, he joined the faculty at Howard in Washington, D.C.. He stayed there until 1948, when he returned to Trinidad to work for the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission.

Did any black dare to run for the presidency or vice-presidency? In the 1936 and

again in 1940s, the Communist Party of the United States nominated a black man, James W. Ford, as its vice-presidential candidate. Need I tell you that he didn’t win?

Most whites (and many blacks) must have been seen his nomination as some sort of ridiculous stunt. Imagine a black man one heart beat away from the presidency of the UnitedStates?

The possession of any so-called black “blood” vetoed the possibility of a black

advancing to high political office. The one-drop rule had the virtue of unifying nonwhite peoples to a degree unknown almost anywhere else.

Contempt for blacks wasopen. Surveying the work of white writers of fiction, Sterling Brown of Howard University identified seven stereotypes—like the seven deadly sins of medieval times—to which white writers turned to depict black characters.

The seven were the contented slave; the wretched freeman; the comic Negro; the brute Negro; the tragic mulatto; the local color Negro; and the exotic primitive. The idea of blacks having dignity, honor, bravery, integrity, or intelligence was forbidden in Hollywood even more than in novels.

Nevertheless, by this time—1940, let us say, to pick a year—the infiltration of

white consciousness by black culture, in order to resist and ultimately reverse or undo this horrible state of affairs, had already begun.

The idea of a vast group’s “consciousness,” which might be “infiltrated” covertly by subversive elements, may seem fanciful to some people; and yet these are categories we must consider seriously in trying to explore this broader question of the black American image in the white and the black

mind.

I think we have no real hope of understanding the emergence of the Obama

candidacy. Tracking the interplay between elements such as race, culture, and politics is not easy. The United States of America, with its slippery cultural fluidity, its marvelous but intriguing Constitution, its hyperactive legal system and legal practices, its relentless capacity for rejuvenation and re-invention, presents a particularly difficult field in which to conduct this kind of examination and understand what has happened to us. But try to understand it, we must.

But in one sense white racism in America, with its legal anchor in Plessy v.

Ferguson and its social exclusionism of blacks, was a kind of Maginot line, like the

infamous line of military defenses the French once put in place, its formidable guns pointing in one direction, only to have the enemy move around it and defeat France.

History appears to show that no evil system can defend itself forever by using such tools, forceful as they can be. In hindsight, the beginning of the end of white supremacy was the genius of black music, dance, and humor—but especially music—and the helplessness of white people, especially pliable white youth, faced by the charms of those forms.

Art forms such as ragtime, the blues, and jazz brought the black sensibility, and

blacks themselves, even if they sometimes had to come in by the back door, into places where the law sought to bar them.

Seen at first as for the most part harmless, frivolous, and diverting, a succession of gifted blacks began to colonize white consciousness. This colonization had an earlier history, of course, in slavery.

But it is the 2oth century that concerns us. If we look at the 1920s alone, we see something of this dynamic of infiltration and colonization at work in the rise of all-black Broadway musical and in blues recordings by pioneering singers as Bessie Smith, Clara Smith, and Mamie Smith, and jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

Certain white musicians of the age aided in the colonization.

In 1924 in Manhattan, when an all-white orchestra performed the sensational premiere of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, with its bold, innovative appropriation and appreciation of black jazz and the blues, a significant

breach had opened in the walls that defended white supremacy.

Thus began the veritable tidal impact that would culminate in the arrival decades later of white rock ’n roll stars such as Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Eric Clapton, all of whom, if in varying degrees of frankness, would pay tribute to the black roots of their transformative and transformed music.

Various artists, white and black, began to explore urgently explored the forbidden

territory of racial integration.

America’s finest playwright, Eugene O’Neill, depicted the complexity of American psychology and racial feeling in The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings. Jazz and jazz performers are essential element in two of the three most influential novels of the decade, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and

Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The third novel, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, drew similarly on the black blues of the Deep South.

The landmark musical Show Boat featured the subversive song “Ol’ Man River,” sung by Paul Robeson, who would emerge as perhaps the first black American male sex symbol accepted by the white establishment. Suppressing the Negro in America almost always entailed the white man’s fear, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of the black man’s sexuality.

Early in the century, the black boxer Jack Johnson (heavyweight champion from 1908 to 1915) had flaunted both his money and his right to freedom by marrying a white woman.

When she killed herself, he married another. Johnson so upset whites that they began to search for someone they called openly the Great White Hope. Whites pushed back decisively in almost all areas of athletic competition.

They drove out from the world of horse racing black jockeys, who had formerly excelled at the highest level, including the Kentucky Derby.

Baseball, the national pastime, was cleansed, as blacks were barred from the

Major Leagues and were made to scramble for a living in the hardscrabble Negro

Leagues.

Blacks, to some extent intimidated, had to adapt. When boxing eventually

produced a black star acceptable to whites, he was, predictably, the opposite of Jack Johnson.

Humble in his demeanor, soft spoken, and apparently none too bright, Joe

Louis served in part as a theatrical prop in America’s opposition to Hitler by defeating the feared German boxer Max Schmeling. In truth, The black American athlete was mainly a pawn or a token, as was the black national politician.

World War II changed many things, if at first very slowly, even painfully so. When the U.S. entered the war, the army was segregated and treated its blacks as inferiors.

The navy accepted no black volunteers or conscripts. The Marine Corps also barred blacks.

Finally in 1943, after heavy pressure by civil rights organizations, blacks were allowed into OCS, or Officer Candidacy School. But aside from the efforts of the Tuskegee Airmen, few blacks saw combat. They were thus denied access to the nation’s treasured badges of courage, honor, and manhood.

The end of World War II found black Americans apparently in much the same

position they were in when it began. But that was an illusion.

The world was changing fast, the world had changed. These changes included the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the threat of universal nuclear annihilation; the ominous falling of the Iron Curtain between the Soviet Union and Western Europe; the Cold War rivalry between the ideologies of capitalism and communism; and the fatal weakening of the British, French, and other European colonial empires that started in 1947, when India became independent. Wearing its albatross of white supremacy with increasing

embarrassment if not shame, the U.S. tried with decreasing success to define, defend, and assert its moral qualities against an array of progressive forces.

The next few years would bring striking changes. They started, in a sense, with

one event that seemed almost trivial. In 1946, the Brooklyn Dodgers invited to its

training camp a black player, Jackie Robinson. For a year he starred on the Dodgers’ Minor League team in Montreal; then, to the consternation but also to the delight of many whites, he integrated Major League baseball when the 1947 season opened.

Predicted as almost certain to fail by some experts, because as a black he was supposed to lack innately the sterling traits of character that allowed white stars to succeed, he became Rookie of the Year in the National League, and two years later, in 1949, was chosen as its Most Valuable Player.

The colorful flair and yet cool competence with which Robinson played the game assailed stereotypes about blacks, who were said to lack the sterling qualities of character needed to maintain fine play at the highest level of the sport.

Robinson also refuted the notion that white teammates, especially those from the South, would refuse to live so closely with a black man. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would later admit freely that Robinson was the prime model and inspiration for civil rights activists in assessing how far blacks could go, and how they should comport themselves, in negotiating their way into the white world.

Change continued. In 1948, President Truman stunned and dismayed many white

people, including the hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would later become president himself, by integrating the armed forces with an executive presidential order.

In 1950, an African-American, Ralph Bunche, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his dangerous but effective work in Palestine. This honor spoke eloquently to the tragic waste of black talent over many generations, in that the US would never have allowed him to be in a position to win the prize, which he won a United Nations official.

The same year, the poet Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize. In 1953, Ralph Ellison beat out Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, who would both win Nobel Prizes, to win the National Book Award in fiction.

Then, in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in the case Brown v. Board of Education that in public schools the practice of racial segregation was unconstitutional The doctrine of “separate but equal” treatment of blacks and whites would not do. It was inherently flawed, selfcontradictory, and inconsistent with American values and the Constitution.

Our longest national tragedy appeared to be over. It was not, as you know, but

the story of the civil rights movement is certainly so familiar to you that we can turn our attention to less obvious but perhaps equally vital ways in which African-American culture asserted itself on the national stage—although I could say a few things about the comparison of Obama to Dr. King.

One key area was Hollywood. In 1915, the director D.W. Griffith’s movie The Birth of a Nation, acknowledged as a technical and esthetic milestone in motion picture history, was so crudely artful and timely in its race-baiting that it spurred the revival of the Ku Klux Klan across the South.

Subsequently, Hollywood absorbed the essential derogatory message about race in this movie. No wonder that the distinguished film historian Donald Bogle called his authoritative book on blacks in Hollywood Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films.

In the dark of countless movie houses, whites guffawed at the bug-eyed, dim-witted, illiterate drawl of black buffoons, or pitied and despised cowardly or incompetent black characters. In these same darkened movie houses (in segregated balconies throughout the South), black Americans both resented the

portrait of themselves projected onto the silver screen or sadly, in too many instances, internalized the distortion as self-hatred.

Not until 1949—in those almost magical postwar years again—do we find the

first movies designed with an explicitly liberal intent—movies such as Home of the Brave (about black soldiers and the presumption of their cowardice), Intruder in the Dust (based on a work of fiction by Faulkner, set in the South), and Pinky, about passing for white.

Such movies tried to depict blacks with a measure of integrity and complexity.

Typically, they did so in awkward ways that spoke to the nation’s confusion about the issue. (In many a movie, as we learned in our movie houses in Trinidad, if a black man showed up among whites on the screen, he was going to die.)

In addition, the genuine black movie star was almost impossible to imagine. And then suddenly, two actors, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, appeared in movies and began to break the old racial stereotypes. (Poitier’s first film also appeared in 1949; Belafonte’s first in 1953.)

One can’t miss the fact that both men had strong Caribbean backgrounds—that is,

backgrounds that (like Obama’s) were not exclusively or even fundamentally African-American.

Both men, the first Miami-born but brought up in his parents’ Bahamas, the

other Harlem-born but taken by his mother to live for several years in her native Jamaica, exuded on the screen a degree of confidence never seen before in black men in Hollywood—as well as “sex appeal” to an extent verboten to this point for black actors in Hollywood.

How did the Caribbean background of Poitier and Belafonte help them become stars, and also determine their image, at this crucial time?

I would guess in two major ways.

First, unlike other native-born blacks, perhaps, they had not internalized an

expectation of failure or rejection at the hands of whites. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, whites were obviously prepared to accept from blacks who were not identifiably or unambiguously African-American a confident presumption of self-worth that these same whites would not have tolerated in American blacks.

The white response to black male sexuality is intriguing here. Poitier, who worked to cover up his Bahamian accent on the screen, and tried for professional, perfectly acceptable reasons to present himself as a kind of “genuine” African-American, had to be, and was, the more demure of the two men.

Belafonte, who emphasized and even exaggerated his Jamaican roots in order to succeed as a calypso singer (which he did with spectacular success), could be

and certain was far sexier on both stage and screen. In his role in the 1957 movie Island in the Sun, itself set in the Caribbean and not in the United States, he ventured further into the minefield of miscegenation between a black man and a white woman than any black actor had gone in a Hollywood film—and returned unscathed.

The world was changing. (Soon a freed Poitier and Hollywood would bring us Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?)

Among several emerging women stars, Lena Horne and Eartha Kitt (the former as

singer and actress, the latter almost exclusively as a singer) also gave off a steamy sexual charm and exuded a measure of self-confidence as entertainers that had never been seen among black entertainers facing mainstream white audiences.

However, these elements, although remarkable, were not revolutionary. Black American women, both in and after slavery, had seldom been called upon to suppress their sexual power; instead, they had been asked to expose it, for the benefit of white men.

Certain light-skinned racial types, such as the “octoroon,” seemed to hold a special fascination for white men—and, perhaps as a result, for black men too.

Among the media, television was far more timid than the movies when it faced

the issue of race. This timidity sprang from its essential domesticity in practice, the intimacy of its place in the home. Also, its programs were rigidly dependent on corporate sponsors who were chronically nervous about offending customers or potential customers.

Thus, despite the fact that Nat King Cole’s lush recordings of sentimental ballads were extraordinarily popular across America starting in the late 1940s, he failed

miserably on television.

Or rather, his variety show on the NBC national network failed to survive. From its debut in 1956 critics deemed it an artistic success, but Cole abandoned it after slightly more than a year because very few companies would agree to sponsor it consistently. (The network itself showed courage, but to no avail.)

No doubt this failure served as a warning to Johnny Mathis, another immensely popular black balladeer of the era; he stayed away from television even as sales of his songs soared.

When blacks and whites appeared together on a television show, everyone trod very carefully. When on one occasion the popular white crooner Dean Martin offered his handkerchief to the multi-talented Sammy Davis Jr. (the sole black member of a circle of entertainers known as the “ratpack,” led by Frank Sinatra) after Davis finished a particularly strenuous number, observers saw the gesture as uncommonly bold.

When Joan Crawford pecked Davis on the cheek during a televised awards ceremony, many members of the audience gasped instinctively. These moments came at least a decade after the Brown decision.

Nevertheless, it should be recognized that in their harmonizing of the strains of

romantic love for an intensely receptive white audience, Cole, Mathis, and other African-American singers, including the blind Ray Charles, brought a sense of black dignity and esthetic prestige that had been barred from full expression before this era.

Charles even crossed over with great success from the black-dominated realm of rhythm-and-blues into the normally lily-white country-and-western world. Occasionally, black entertainers—Nat King Cole was one of these—were treated roughly in the South, but on the whole they conquered America, and especially young white America.

A higher level of prestige, though not necessarily of effectiveness, followed the

efforts of blacks in the world of classical musical. Such efforts date back at least to the nineteenth century—although a master of German lieder such as Roland Hayes in the early twentieth century found a much warmer reception in Europe than at home.

For generations, black leaders had clung to the notion that achieving distinction in classical music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and other “high” arts would compel whites to recognize black humanity and weaken segregation and racism. It is hard to judge how correct these leaders were.

They seemed justified when Marian Anderson became a national symbol of dignity and artistic talent after she was denied permission by the

hyper-patriotic Daughters of the American Revolution to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. but then performed outdoors before a huge assembly at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939, at the behest of Eleanor Roosevelt.

In the wake of 1954 blacks flourished as never before in the world of operas and recitals.

In 1955, an aging Anderson integrated the Metropolitan Opera Company when she appeared in a performance of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. In Manhattan, the new Metropolitan Opera facility at the massive Lincoln Center cultural complex opened in 1966 with a performance of Anthony and Cleopatra, a new opera by Samuel Barber commissioned specifically for Leontyne Price in her glorious prime.

But the classical area revealed curious patterns. Prominent black classical

instrumentalists were—and are—embarrassingly few. The bi-racial pianist Andre Watts(an African-American father, a German mother) became a star while still young, as did—much later—the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, when he turned away from jazz to explore the classical trumpet repertoire.

Compared to the success of black divas such as Anderson, Price, Kathleen Battle, and Jessye Norman, black male singers have achieved relatively little. In ballet, Arthur Mitchell became a leading member of Balanchine’s New York City Ballet; but few blacks succeeded him at that level.

Painters have had to struggle for national recognition, with Romare Bearden achieving the only notable success as an abstract modernist.

Writers, however, have done much to lift the image of the black American as creative artist. Their efforts were crowned, so to speak, when Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993.

In sport, starting with Jackie Robinson in baseball, blacks made spectacular

progress in garnering awards for their talents—and the full range of their personality and humanity recognized.

The tragic Arthur Ashe, doomed to die early of AIDS contracted from a blood transfusion, became an icon of nobility and dignity even before his medical

ordeal. But in some ways, the phenomenon of Cassius Clay is more significant here. As a youthful braggart winning an Olympic Games medal in Rome in 1960, whites found him amusing; as a defiant Muslim, renamed Muhammad Ali, they (the authorities, strictly speaking) stripped him of his title and threatened him with jail for refusing to take up arms against the Vietnamese.

Later, however, he would become so nationally and internationally respected and even beloved that he was asked to light the Olympic torch at the 1996 games in Atlanta. The two black athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who stood on the victory platform at the Olympic games in Mexico City in 1968 wearing black gloves on upheld fists were sent packing home in disgrace; but forty years later, a

statue has been erected in their honor in San Jose, California, where they attended college.

Such men paved the way for the emergence of international superstars such as

Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, who have taken the image of the African-American in sport—and to some extent in life—to heights unanticipated in even the recent past.

Both of these stars, and others, have refused to accept older, possibly outmoded to their thinking, notions of black racial solidarity. Jordan refused to lend his support to a black Democratic Party candidate for the Senate in his home state of North Carolina.

“Republicans buy sneakers, too,” he is said remarked, as he acknowledged his greater allegiance to one of his key sponsors. Woods—yet another high-achieving half-black, with an African-American father and a Thai mother—once declared himself, perhaps partly in jest, to be not black but “Cabalasian.”

The effect of black athletes expressing their newfound sense of freedom and confidence may be seen in another area.

Muhammad Ali, along with the basketball giant Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, born Lewis

Alcindor, and lesser sportsmen such as the football player and sports commentator Ahmad Rashad (all of these names chosen by the athletes themselves), probably aided Barack Obama in one crucial way.

In blending Islam with their immense popularity as athletes, they paved the way for American whites (and many blacks) to accept a politician named Barack Hussein Obama. Not even the events of September 11, 2001, and the

sudden rise of strong anti-Islamic feeling, could erase this piece of education, or

conversion, or assimilation.

Of course, no accounting of the evolution of the African-American image can

ignore the late 1960s, the early 1970s, and the impact of the separatist Black Power and Black Arts movements.

In this tempestuous period, white Americans as a whole both recoiled from and came to terms with the harsh message about history and chronic white American injustice preached in various forms by militant blacks such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, among others.

This is the main reason, I think, that millions of whites did not desert Obama over the extremely provocative words and actions of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. To many whites, Wright in one sense sounded like a scratchy LP in the age of CDs; but also to many whites, the element of truth in what he said even at his most radical and coarsely theatrical was something they had long ago engaged, if not fully accepted.

The impact of Black Power and Black Arts on black people is a related and yet

different matter. Most black Americans, like most people, are conservative; it requires an effort to be liberal, much less radical. Most people, I think, would prefer not to be bothered.

Thus most black Americans were almost as shocked by the message and manners of Black Power as were white Americans. Their passage through that turbulent time I would call paradoxically the era of their domestic expatriation, when they began to acquire the sense of inner confidence that foreign blacks, including Caribbean blacks, typically brought to the demeaning American scene.

The heyday of Black Power as we knew it was brief. Stokely Carmichael became Kwame Toure and moved to Africa, and Amiri Baraka (born LeRoi Jones) declared himself no longer a separatist but a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist.

But with these defections from Black Power, many if not most blacks were not demoralized.

On the whole, it seems clear, most blacks had become stronger, more confident, and even more content with their place in American life despite its continuing difficulties.

I believe, incidentally, that there could be a line that connects the confidence

generated by Black Power to what, to my mind, is in a way even more amazing than the emergence of Obama.

I refer to the quiet arrival of black captains of industry who preside or presided over institutions worth many billions of dollars. Robert Johnson of the BET network (Black Entertainment Television) has become America’s first black

billionaire—or perhaps the second, following Oprah Winfrey; but I am thinking more of black businessmen heading white organizations, such as Ken Chenault at American Express; Richard Parsons at Time/Warner; and Stanley O’Neal at the iconic brokerage house Merrill Lynch.

And to think that only fifty years ago, and even later, these men would have had some trouble finding a job as store clerks on 125th Street in Harlem.

The impact of Black Power and the durable upsurge of confidence among blacks

who assimilated that impact, as well as the revival of feminism, black and white, about the same time, must have also served as a crucial factor in the making of Oprah Winfrey.

Growing up in humble and troubling circumstances, she has now reigned for some years as the queen of American television.

In the process, she has become immensely rich by displaying astute business skills and a commanding maturity. A beautiful brown-skinned woman, she traded not at all, or very little, on her sexual appeal in rising as a television personality.

Instead, she conquered the world of whites, especially white women, by

being both jauntily feminine and quintessentially American—energetic, optimistic,

curious, intelligent, ambitious, and yet just. She mastered the white world while keeping the respect of blacks by her consistent involvement of blacks as guests and experts on her show.

A few black entertainers, notably perhaps Bill Cosby, have also succeeded in

crossing the color line decisively; but Winfrey’s almost daily exhibition on television of her gifts of mind and heart, as well as the scope of her ambition to educate as well as entertain her viewers, have made her incomparable as a presence.

Her book club astonished the publishing world by its instant success. Her magazine, with her portrait on each cover, flourished from the start. She commands a loyalty among her many millions of viewers that, until Obama, no black politician could begin to match. Her support for Obama at a crucial time in the primary season undoubtedly boosted his fortunes—but in a real way she had prepared the way for him.

By the way, it is estimated that she won Obama about a million votes when she endorsed his candidacy—and cost herself about one million viewers in doing so.

Finally, there is the record of blacks in electoral politics and in presidential

administrations. As for electoral politics: we have come a long way from the time when the glamorous, flamboyant, virtually white Adam Clayton Powell III, a lonely and embittered lion from Harlem, lived large and mocked and defied the rules of the US Congress, hiding in plain sight in the Bahamas even as he legally represented Harlem.

Now his successor in Congress, Charles Rangel, is the soul of sobriety as well as wit, wisdom, authority, and competence as chairman of the mighty House Ways and Means Committee.

But the severe difficulties that faced, and still face, the black politician who

would aspire to national office become clear when we rise above the limited

constituencies of the House of Representatives to the larger, truly race-haunted territory of the Senate, with its one hundred members.

In the entire 20th century only two blacks, Edward Brooke (two terms, from 1966 to 1978) and Carol Moseley Braun (1993-1999) became senators; and each left office under a large cloud.

Now Obama is the only black senator. Black governors are even rarer. Since Reconstruction, only L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia had been elected a governor (1990-1994) until 2006, when Deval Patrick became the governor of Massachusetts.

Thanks to his white predecessor’s indiscretions, David Patterson of Harlem became governor of New York in 2008, after serving as lieutenant governor when the Spitzer scandal broke.

As for presidency itself, the ascendancy of Obama is astonishing because until his

arrival no black aspirant seemed to have a chance at winning, or even coming close to winning; being on a ticket doesn’t mean that you have a chance.

The gallant Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn, with her strong Caribbean roots, ran quixotically for the highest office in 1972 while serving in the House of Representatives.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson who, with his Rainbow Coalition that, sadly, seldom seemed to comprise more than different shades of black, ran for the presidency in 1984 and 1988. Although he once, as President Clinton reminded us famously or infamously, won South Carolina in a primary election, his success was always minor.

If one steps down from the presidency but remains within the White House in

order to check the history of black appointees to the various cabinets, one sees a

relatively blank slate until recently. Blacks held no cabinet positions in the Kennedy administration, despite his wild popularity among them. They entered at a secondary level within the cabinet in the Johnson administrations and beyond.

None shone very brightly; all seemed to be tokens, even if each was doubtless competent. If there was a low point on this score, it came perhaps when, according to reports, President Reagan mistook his only black cabinet member for a mayor who happened to be visiting the White House.

The great change came, I believe, with a quiet announcement made just after

William Jefferson Clinton won office in 1992. The statement made it known that

presidential appointments in the new administration would be vetted initially by a tiny group led by a former civil rights leader who had been shot in the back by a white sniper after a meeting with a white woman at a motel. With this second chance at life, Vernon Jordan turned to working for an elite law firm and to employing his undeniable charm to establish and solidify important political alliances.

In the Clinton administrations, blacks held many more high offices than had been dreamt of previously. But it was left, ironically, to the present President Bush to appoint Colin Powell, and then Condoleezza Rice, both of whom had been championed out of relative obscurity by his father, President George H.W. Bush, to the illustrious position of Secretary of State, a position once held by Thomas Jefferson, among others.

Powell, a military hero, is the child of Jamaican immigrants. (It has been said that had his parents gone to Great Britain instead, Powell almost certainly would have been successful there too—but more likely as a highly respected bus conductor in the London Transit system.) Rice is a child of the aspiring Southern black middle class who had become a trained Soviet Union expert with a teaching position at Stanford University, where she impressed a former Republican Secretary of State, George Schultz, who propelled her toward a position in national

security. There she caught the attention of the younger President Bush.

I should point out that while both Powell and Rice benefited from personal

patronage, there is nothing inherently wrong with such patronage, and there was nothing wrong and undeserved about their promotions.

Having come thus far, blacks are perhaps now ready for the next step—although

there is a world of difference between a presidential appointment and winning a national election.

Again, I have no definitive explanation for the exalted position in which Barack

Obama finds himself. In fact, I still see an enormous disconnect, as some people would put it, between the white America I know and have traditionally experienced, and the white America that is supposed to be on the brink of choosing a black president. I know that Obama has benefited from the arrival of a perfect storm, one that has exposed and badly damaged his opposition. Four consecutive presidential terms, Democratic and Republican, have been marked by some success—Bill Clinton’s—but also have been scarred by personal and professional errors and malfeasance of which Americans are tired and ashamed.

And to cap it all, there is the exhilarating downward slide into a recession, which holds the mordant promise of becoming another Great Depression.

But none of this would matter if Obama himself did not attract the masses of

white people, and other people, in some irresistible way. Obviously, given his truly thin (in my opinion) record, these people have decided to place their trust in him and his personal abilities.

They see Obama as having an extraordinary character, one hard to define but captivating all the same. If he is elected and proves to be a fine president, an

enormous amount of credit must be given to these people, the American people, for their shrewdness and wisdom.

To me, the most perceptive and brilliant analysis of Obama’s character and his

appeal has come from the New York Times columnist David Brooks, a conservative writer whose work I have often found irritating and, from my point of view, inconsistent.

But I think he is in a league of his own with the subtlety he showed in a recent assessment of Obama.

To do justice to him, I need to quote him at length. “We’ve been watching Barack Obama for two years now,” Brooks wrote, “and in all that time there hasn’t been

a moment in which he has publicly lost his self-control.

This has been a period of tumult, combat, exhaustion and crisis. And yet there hasn’t been a moment when he has displayed rage, resentment, fear, anxiety, bitterness, tears, ecstasy, self-pity or impulsiveness.”

If certain prominent presidents were men driven by some urgent personal need, Obama is among those few, including Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, who were “propelled by what some psychologists call self-efficacy, the placid assumption that they can handle whatever the future throws at them.”

These men “are driven upward by a desire to realize some capacity in their nature. They rise with an unshakable serenity that is inexplicable to their critics and infuriating to their foes.”

Obama’s abandonment by his father, and the geographical and cultural anderings of his mother, could easily have left him permanently confused and wounded—but he hasn’t acted at all like a confused or wounded man.

“There has never been a moment,” Brooks says about the past two years, “when, at least in public, he seems gripped by inner turmoil. It’s not willpower or self-discipline he shows as much as an organized unconscious.

Through some deep, bottom-up process, he has developed strategies for

equanimity.”

At every challenging moment, “his instinct was to self-remove and establish an observer’s perspective.” In the last presidential debate, against an markedly

aggressive McCain, Obama remained “reassuring and self-composed.”

Unlike McCain, who seemed to be in the midst of a conniption fit, “Obama didn’t reveal even unconscious signs of nervousness. There was no hint of an unwanted feeling.”

Nor has being the object of virtual worship corrupted him, apparently. “Far from getting drunk on it [this adulation],” according to Brooks, “he has become less grandiloquent as the campaign has gone along. . . . He doesn’t seem to need the audience’s love. . . . [They] hunger for his affection, while he is calm, appreciative and didactic.”

It’s important to note that Brooks sees a possibly negative side to Obama’s sense

of removal—and let me say frankly that I myself have been making the same point to my friends, at some cost to my popularity, for some months now. “It is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president,” Brooks admits of Obama.

“He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather . . . some of the smartest minds [and] give them free rein. . . . It is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem.”

But then: “It’s also easy to imagine a scenario in which he is not an island of rationality in a sea of tumult, but simply an island. . . . It could be that Obama will be an observer, not a leader.”

He could hang bank and let other, lesser leaders have their way. Caught up in his alertness to nuances, be could become “passive and ineffectual.” A “lack of passion” might even lead to a “lack of courage. The Obama greatness,” Brooks speculates, could “give way to the Obama anti-climax.”

That’s speculation only, of course.

I am left with the overwhelming sense of a mystery surrounding Obama and his groundbreaking appeal to so many people, white and black. He is unique. Remove him from the scene, for example, and I see no other African-American with any plausible chance of achieving what he has achieved in this election.

I do think, however, that his current candidacy, whether he wins or loses, will

open the way for other black candidates to appeal to the nation as a whole, just as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s defeat has probably achieved the same promise of advancement for women.

The whirligig of Time brings in its revenges, Shakespeare wrote; but it also

brings in its tendencies toward progress. Obama’s ascendancy marks one of those

historic surges of progressive faith that have sustained humanity over the centuries and proven in the end, for the most part, to be a boon to us all.

Certainly his ascendancy has been a boon to the spirit of black Americans, all Americans of good will, and all the people around the world who identify America with democracy and justice.

I began this lecture with an epigraph from the celebrated African-American writer

Richard Wright: “The Negro is America’s metaphor.” Perhaps America is the world’s metaphor.

Wright’s words hovered in my head when I began my first attempt at composing this talk, when I was still nervous and uncertain about what I would say in an

essay honoring the memory of Dr. Williams. I don’t know why they did.

Then, when I was almost done, I thought I should double-check my source, to make sure they were indeed Wright’s words and that I had remembered them accurately.

I then searched for my copy of the book in which Wright’s essay containing this sentence was first published, White Man, Listen! As I flipped open the book, I was stunned to realize that I had forgotten the fact that Wright had dedicated White Man, Listen! “to my friend, Eric Williams, Chief Minister of the Government of Trinidad and Tobago and Leader of the People’s National Movement; and to THE WESTERNIZED AND TRAGIC ELITE OF ASIA, AFRICA, AND THE WEST INDIES.”

Both Richard Wright and Dr. Williams, I’m sure, would be surprised and moved,

and thrilled, if they had lived long enough to witness the phenomenon of Barack Obama unfold in all its human and political and American glory and complexity.

The Eric Williams Memorial Lecture seeks to provide an intellectual forum for the examination of pertinent issues in Caribbean and African Diaspora history and politics.