Will the Obama Generation Merge With the Protest Culture of MLK or Strike Its Own Path?

By Danny Schechter, AlterNet. Posted January 19, 2009.

"And I wept again for them, because I wanted them to be there, and I thought that if Doctor came, Chavez maybe just be there for a moment in time, and  I just kept thinking about Martin Luther King, just like … if they were just there for a  moment in time, my whole life would have been fulfilled.  So I was thinking about the joy and the journey.  That kind of took me to a level of ecstasy and joy." 

This was not a history referenced by most commentators covering the Obama campaign. 

There is a complicated tension between civil rights leaders and President-elect Obama. Their difference is more about how change can made -- will it all come from the inside through an inherently conservative, compromised and bureaucratic political process, or does there need to be pressure  from the outside at the grassroots, or "street heat" as one of the reverend's supporters put it?  

Is the movement model fashioned by King and civil rights organization calling for activism still needed, or is it passé? Is there still a need and role for the Rev. Jacksons? 

With Obama mounting a charm offensive to neutralize enemies and seduce opponents on the right, it seems that he is running away from progressive supporters. After he met with hard-right commentators last week, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, the first publication to endorse Jackson years back, asked why progressive supporters were being ignored. 

Obama came out of the Saul Alinsky tradition of community organizing. While Alinsky's most famous book was called Reveille For Radicals, by the time I met and worked with him in a real organizing school in 1965, he had become a reformer and pragmatist, quiet on the Vietnam War, solicitous of liberal Democrats and hostile to student movements.  

Jesse Jackson remains an organizer in the big-tent movement tradition. He was preaching Rainbow Coalition for decades before Obama made the idea jell politically. 

PUSH, an acronym for People United to Save Humanity, is firmly pro-peace and economic justice and was founded by Jackson. Obama has so far been eloquent at tapping movement rhetoric, but he seems distant, even dismissive, of movement culture. Many of his most devoted backers want to know if he is married to promoting change or just shucking and jiving. Will he remain an advocate for transforming the system or become a prisoner of power? Will he turn his back on King's commitment to nonviolence, or has he already? 

Can the Obama generation and the King-Jackson culture -- one with an outside-in strategy, the other inside-out -- merge, or are they inherently in conflict? Will Obama give his predecessors the props they deserve? Can the fight for change that Jackson and Obama embrace work on many levels?  If Obama can reconcile with Republicans, why not with the long marchers of the Rainbow? 

These are questions that will soon be tested in a new administration that starts this week.

See more stories tagged with: king, obama, jackson

Danny Schechter writes a blog for Media Channe. He is the author of Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception: How the Media Failed to Cover the War on Iraq (Prometheus).

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Election 2008! Sign up now »