Prometheus 6

I think, as a practical matter, that those who want Black folk to militate against voting in general, and against Democrats and Obama specifically need to see what they're up against.

I threw in the last guy, who is just biting, because white folks have identity issues too.

Ms. Woods-Jones, now in her 60s, is one of a tiny handful of delegates who on the same day in 1963, Aug. 28, stood with hundreds of thousands at the March on Washington and heard a young minister, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., deliver his soaring “I Have a Dream” speech.

“I was young, naïve enough to think I would see that in 5, 10 years,” she said. “Then you see leaders killed, you see police brutality, residential segregation in cities. About 10 years ago I thought: I won’t see this. This is something for my grandchildren.”

She paused, her eyes now red-rimmed.

“What to say except, ‘Oh, hallelujah!’ ” she said. “We have a lot of work, a lot, but we are so much closer than I expected.”

The year had been difficult for civil rights supporters. In April, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Birmingham, Ala.; a month later, national media captured Birmingham police attacking demonstrators with dogs and fire hoses. And June 12, Ladner's mentor, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, 37, was slain in Jackson, Miss., after returning home from a meeting that Ladner had attended.

As she stood backstage the day of the march, the messages about freedom and justice rang empty in her ears. "We're all here," she remembered thinking, "and we're going to listen to all these speeches, then we're going to go back to Mississippi and get called [racial epithets] again. This isn't going to change anything."

As Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) prepares to accept the Democratic Party's nomination for president tonight, 45 years after she heard King deliver his "I Have a Dream" plea for a colorblind America, Ladner, 66, said she realizes that those words did begin to change race relations.

"Dr. King's dream . . . is being fulfilled," said Ladner, a retired social worker who lives in Northwest Washington and worked for years at D.C. General Hospital. "He mentioned that he didn't want his children to be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. He was looking to the future with hope and faith that this grand land of America would someday accept all people. Barack Obama's nomination is a fulfillment of that dream."

It reminds Taylor of the reactions she sometimes receives from other Wisconsin legislators when she mentions she is the chamber's only black female member. And it will not stop her from speaking out about what she is feeling now.

"I talk about it because our sense of pride gives hope for other individuals, too. That kind of hope and pride inspires other people into action," she said. "For those who do not want to have that dialogue, I recognize that. But for those of us who are proud of this moment, we are not going to squash that."

Other black delegates here described a similar frame of mind: immense pride and wonderment at the thought of Obama accepting the nomination, coupled with a keen awareness that for many of their fellow Democrats, beating Sen. John McCain is the priority. The black delegates said that they share that goal with no less intensity -- but that on this day, they could not help but pause to reflect on the history being made.

Johnson’s Dream, Obama’s Speech
By ROBERT A. CARO

AS I watch Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic convention tonight, I will be remembering another speech: the one that made Martin Luther King cry. And I will be thinking: Mr. Obama’s speech — and in a way his whole candidacy — might not have been possible had that other speech not been given.

That speech was President Lyndon Johnson’s address to Congress in 1965 announcing that he was about to introduce a voting rights act, and in some respects Mr. Obama’s candidacy is the climax — at least thus far — of a movement based not only on the sacrifices and heroism of the Rev. Dr. King and generations of black fighters for civil rights but also on the political genius of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who as it happens was born 100 years ago yesterday.