American voters honour Martin Luther King's dream with victory for Obama
When the first African-American cast a vote in 1870 he thought the world had changed. Yesterday the US proved it really had
Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King, Jr: a result he could only have dreamt of Ben Macintyre

On March 31, 1870 Thomas Mundy Peterson, the son of slaves, did something that no African-American had ever done before: he voted.

Slavery had been formally abolished five years earlier, and the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution had established that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by any state on account of race, colour or previous condition of servitude”.

Tom Peterson, a 47-year-old school janitor, exercised that right in Amboy, New Jersey, casting his vote under the angry stares of the town’s white inhabitants. He voted Republican, in recognition of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator.

Peterson’s humble and courageous act reaches forward to the election of Barack Obama, and back through the generations of black people taken from Africa and forced to live in American servitude. The idea that a black man could vote would have been as unimaginable to Peterson’s slave ancestors as the idea of a black president would have been unthinkable to Peterson himself.

We imagine history to happen in a linear progression, in this instance a straight line from bondage to freedom to civil rights to equal rights, from Mundy to Martin Luther King to Barack Obama. But history — least of all the tortured history of black America — does not work that way.

For a brief period after emancipation, black democracy seemed about to flourish. Two black men, one a preacher, Hiram Revels, and the other a teacher, Blanche Bruse, were elected to the US Senate from Mississippi. To this day they are the only African-Americans ever to represent a Southern state in the Senate.

The dream of black democracy swiftly evaporated. The Ku Klux Klan had aleady come into being at the end of the Civil War in 1865. As Reconstruction collapsed after a few years, black voting rights were suppressed, racial segregation was imposed, lynchings, race riots and school burnings spread.

State-sanctioned racism emerged in the Southern states but infected the North. The systematic oppression of one race by the other in the “Jim Crow” system of laws would remain virtually intact until the 1950s. In Southern states blacks could not vote or sit on juries or take part in enforcing the law. Blacks could not go to the same schools as white people; they could not eat in the same restaurants, travel on the same train cars, live in the same neighbourhoods, or shop in the same places.

Between 1889 and 1922 about 3,500 people were lynched, most of them black men. This form of murder cruelly emphasised the powerlessness of the victim: the killing took place in public, the guilty were known to all, and effectively immune from prosecution.

From about 1915 black Americans headed north and west in huge numbers to escape the persecution, in what became know as the Great Migration. Slowly, painfully, African-Americans fought back, through litigation, education and lobbying. Campaigns of civil disobedience and direct action evolved into the civil rights movement.

In 1954 the Supreme Court finally outlawed segregation in schools. A year later a young seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person on an Alabama bus. She was, she said, “tired of giving in”. She was arrested, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott and huge protests.

Six-year-old Ruby Bridges was accompanied to school by federal marshals in 1960, to become the first African-American pupil at the all-white William Franz School in New Orleans. The white pupils at the school promptly left, and all but one teacher. For more than a year, Ruby Bridges was taught alone.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination in employment and the 1965 Voting Rights Acts restored and protected black voting rights, nearly a century after Peterson’s first vote.

The rising hope was personified by Martin Luther King, the Baptist minister whose extraordinary natural oratory and energetic leadership of the civil rights movement earned him the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 36. King was prominent in organising the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, to dramatise the appalling poverty and discrimination against blacks in Southern states and to demand civil rights legislation.

More than quarter of a million people massed for the largest demonstration in Washington’s history, to hear King deliver his “I Have Dream Speech”, a masterpiece of public speaking that would offer a frame the civil rights movement in the same way that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address had captured the moral momentum behind the civil war.

“I have a dream,” he said, “that one day, down in Alabama, with it vicious racists . . . one day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”
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This year pollsters predicted a record turnout of as much as 81 per cent in the state of Alabama, after black residents registered to vote in record numbers.

The protesters marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, but not before the first attempt to do so had been broken up by police using teargas and clubs. Footage of the violence would outrage public opinion as never before.

With hindsight, black rights were also marching forward, but it did not always feel like that on the ground. “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” declared George Wallace, Governor of Alabama.

Progress came soaked in the blood of African-American martyrs: Medgar Evers, field director of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, holding a banner that read “Jim Crow Must Go”, was shot dead by a member of the KKK outside his home; Martin Luther King was killed while standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, sparking riots in more than 100 American cities.

The political power of African-America swelled gradually, and hope rose. In 1967 Thurgood Marshall, the son of a railroad porter, became the first African-American to join the Supreme Court.

In 1983 Jesse Jackson ran for president. In 1989 Colin Powell became the first African-American to head the Armed Forces, and then later the nation’s first black Secretary of State.

In 1995 the Nation of Islam convened the Million Man March on Washington, in a powerful demonstration of African-American political engagement.

The following year a young lawyer named Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate. In the same year that Peterson cast his vote, Hiram Revels became the first African-American in the US Senate; 135 years later, Mr Obama would become only the fifth.

The pace of political change for black Americans had been, up until that moment, impossibly slow; but in the three years since then, it has seemed to move with impossible swiftness.

In his “I Have a Dream” Speech, Martin Luther King spoke of the promise of equality enshrined in the Constitution. “America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of colour are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’.”

Yesterday American voters — black and white — symbolically honoured the unpaid debt in a way that Martin Luther King could only have dreamt of.

In 1870 Tom Peterson thought the world had changed forever, and he was wrong. Today, millions around the world will feel the same, and they will be right.

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