While Barack Obama built a young multiracial coalition, old-guard civil rights leaders overwhelmingly backed Hillary Clinton. Now that the Clintons themselves are backing Barack, many black leaders are scrambling to get in line. Was it so hard to believe Obama was for real?
LAST JANUARY, A PRETTY WOMAN with brown skin stood on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, her arms wrapped in a self-hug as she shivered against the cold. She wore shoes completely impractical for standingin20-degree weather, and she danced up and down occasionally to keep the blood circulating. She wasn’t alone; hundreds of others were improvising their own strategies to keep warm as they kept their eyes fixed on a massive screen.
Just to her right was the newly built crypt where Coretta Scott King’s remains rested next to those of her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, the last time Auburn Avenue saw lines like these was two days after Mrs. King’s passing on January 30, 2006.
Mourners stood outside for hours to pay homage to her and Martin’s shared dream. But this time they were gathered in the hope of seeing Barack Obama speak at Ebenezer Baptist Church’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day ser- vice, even if that meant watching it on the massive overflow screen on the church’s front lawn. “Forty years have gone by since Dr. King’s death,” said Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, 39, of Ebenezer Baptist Church. “In biblical terms, the number40 holds powerful symbolism.”
He let the words hang. The Ebenezer faithful knew that 40 is the number of days God unleashed the fury waters of the Old Testament; the age of the prophet Muhammad when the Koran was revealed to him; the number of years that the children of Israel wandered before entering the Promised Land. It was also the number of years between the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the day Obama stood in the sanctuary of King’s home church as the front- runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“The generation that left bondage in Egypt wandered for four decades,” Rev. Warnock said, building toward his point, “but it was their children who were the first to enter the Promised Land.”
Warnock’s graceful pulpit manifesto was not lost on the congregation. Standing in King’s church right next to Obama, he’d offered a subtle jab at the civil rights generation leaders—including former U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young and Congressman John
Lewis—who had overwhelmingly lined up behind Hillary Clinton, offering an explanation for why so many young black Obama supporters have begun referring to
those born after King’s death as “the Joshua Generation.”
In the sixth book of the Bible, Joshua takes the mantle of leadership from Moses and leads the descendants of slaves into Canaan. Warnock’s implication was clear: The civil rights generation led African Americans out of the bondage of segregation, but they can’t necessarily lead us into our next phase. One thirty-something supporter standing outside Ebenezer agreed: “They think that unless you got hit over the head during a civil rights march, you don’t know anything about being black.”
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