Dr marten woudstra biography of barack obama

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Need an account? Click here to sign up. Thomas J. Sugrue, Not even Past. Obama and the End of History Jan Hoffmeister. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

As a researcher for the late A. Leon Higginbotham, I came to see how the law first cemented and later subverted the color line in America. They made me a better thinker and a better writer. For this essay, Mark LaFlaur provided invaluable editing. This book is dedicated to my mam and dad, Jean Niven and Willian George Niven, and to my wife, Kirsten Condry, for her love, encouragement, and valuable advice on this essay and for the past 8 years.

In fact, other than Sesame Street characters, Anya recognizes only one person on television: Barack Obama. We have all heard stories about those few magical transformative moments in African American history, extraordinary ritual occasions through which the geographically and socially diverse black community—a nation within a nation, really— molds itself into one united body, determined to achieve one great social purpose and to bear witness to the process by which this grand achievement occurs.

The second was the night of 22 June , the storied rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, when black families and friends crowded around radios to listen and cheer as the Brown Bomber knocked out Schmeling in the first round. The third, of course, was 28 August , when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But we have never seen anything like we witnessed last night.

Nothing could have prepared any of us for the eruption and, yes, that is the word of spontaneous celebration that manifested itself in black homes, gathering places, and the streets of our communities when Sen. Barack Obama was declared President-elect Obama. My colleagues and I laughed and shouted, whooped and hollered, hugged each other and cried.

My father waited ninetyfive years to see this day happen, and when he called last night, I silently thanked God for allowing him to live long enough to cast his vote for the first black man to become president. How many of our ancestors have given their lives—how many millions of slaves toiled in the fields in endlessly thankless and mindless labor—before this generation could live to see a black person become president?

What would Frederick Douglass and W. Du Bois say if they could know what our people had at long last achieved? What would Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman say? What would Dr. King himself say? His victory is not redemption for all of this suffering; rather, it is the symbolic culmination of the black freedom struggle, the grand achievement of a great, collective dream.

And yes, again! A fantasy if ever there was one, we thought. But that year, life would imitate art: Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm attempted to transform The Man into The Woman, when she became the first black woman to run for president in the Democratic Party. She received first-ballot votes at the Democratic National Convention. Then in Jesse Jackson got 1, delegate votes at the Democratic convention, 29 percent of the total, coming in second only to the nominee, Michael Dukakis.

The award for prescience, however, goes to Jacob K. Javits, the liberal Republican senator from New York who, incredibly, just a year after the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, predicted that the first black president would be elected in the year Undoubtedly, he will be well-educated. He will be a dedicated internationalist with working comprehension of the intricacies of foreign aid, technical assistance and reciprocal trade.

Assuredly, though, despite his other characteristics, he will have developed the fortitude to withstand the vicious smear attacks that came his way as he fought to the top in government and politics. Edward Brooke was elected to the Senate by Massachusetts voters in Thurgood Marshall was confirmed in In fact, thirtyseven black U. All in all, Sen.

Javits was one very keen prognosticator. I wish we could say that what happened last night will suddenly make black children learn to read and write as if their lives depended on it, and that their high school completion rates will become the best in the country. I wish we could say that these things are about to happen, but I doubt that they will.

It has been crossed by our very first postmodern Race Man, a man who embraces his African cultural and genetic heritage so securely that he can transcend it, becoming the candidate of choice to tens of millions of Americans who do not look like him. How does that make me feel? But ten thousand times better than that. How sweet the sound. His birth coincided with a crucial turning point in the history of American race relations, although like many turning points it did not seem so at the time.

Few observers believed that Jim Crow was in its death throes. Board of Education , less than one percent of black schoolchildren in the South attended integrated public schools. At the undergraduate level, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was one of the few integrated southern colleges, having admitted three black students in By that number had risen—to four.

In , Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes successfully integrated the University of Georgia, but most other major southern colleges, including Duke, Clemson, and the flagship state universities of South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi remained segregated. Despite the lack of de jure segregation, northern universities were only marginally better.

Ruffin, in , but nearly a century later, there were rarely more than two or three blacks in each graduating class, and there were no African Americans on the Harvard Law School faculty until Despite the Civil Rights acts of and and promises from the new administration of President John F. Kennedy, in some Black Belt counties of Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, up to 90 percent of African Americans were excluded from the political process, as they had been by state law and custom since the late nineteenth century.

There were a handful of black state legislators and city councilmen in the North, and a sprinkling of African Americans sat on boards of education and city councils in the urban upper South, but there were no black mayors other than in all-black towns. While ten percent of all Americans were black in the census, only four African Americans served in the member House of Representatives.

No African Americans sat in the hundred-member U. Senate between the departure of Blanche K. Brooke R-MA in The federal judiciary, the branch of government most responsive to black demands for equality, offered a slightly more positive picture. In the fall of , the U. Senate confirmed James B. By August , however, there was also an emerging challenge to the old racial order—at least in the South.

They began, in the summer of , with the Freedom Rides that ultimately forced the president and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Virginia ruling prohibiting segregation in interstate travel. In the autumn of Moses penned a note from a freezing drunk-tank in Magnolia, Mississippi, where he and eleven others were being held for the crime of attempting to register black voters.

This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg from a stone that the builders rejected. By filling county jails and prison farms, by facing fire hoses, truncheons—and, for Jimmie Lee Jackson, Herbert Lee, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and others, by giving their lives—they ultimately made segregation and disfranchisement untenable.

In alliance with the more cautious, though equally determined, activists of the Southern Christian Leadership Council and the NAACP, and eventually with the support of the administration of a southern-born president, Lyndon B. So too did the Immigration and Nationality Act, which extended the same nondiscriminatory principle to immigration, ended the system of quotas favoring northern Europe, and ushered in new waves of immigration from Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

The nation into which Barack Obama was born was simply not a genuine democracy, and certainly not one in which a person of color might reasonably aspire to the presidency. Indeed, his very existence was to some degree a consequence of those struggles. His father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. As Barack Obama Jr. To that end, Mboya secured scholarship funds from such civil rights movement stalwarts as Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier.

In speeches, Barack Obama has mistakenly credited the family of John F. After Dunham became pregnant, they married. Interracial marriage was legal in Hawaii, but was outlawed at that time in twenty-two states. A Gallup poll found that 96 percent of white Americans opposed such unions. As Obama Jr. Obama Sr. Other than a brief Christmas visit by Obama Sr.

Those values were largely secular, though grounded in the church-based idealism of the early s civil rights movement. As her son later recalled, it was a fairly romanticized idealism. Assisted by her parents and government food stamps, she completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Hawaii, where she met her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student.

Contrary to claims later made by his political opponents, however, he did not attend an Islamic madrassa. He was enrolled, first, in a Roman Catholic elementary school and then in the state-run Basuki school, which taught children of all faiths—Christians, Buddhists, and Confucians, as well as Muslims. The language of instruction was Indonesian.

Dunham briefly moved back to Hawaii with her daughter with Lolo , Maya, to live with Obama and her parents, before returning to Indonesia to pursue an anthropology degree on peasant blacksmithing in Java. She later worked with development organizations in Pakistan and Indonesia to set up microfinance programs to help women in remote villages gain access to credit.

He outlines this process in Dreams from My Father with great honesty and, although it was clearly a time of much anxiety, not a little wit. Barry Obama was, after all, a teenager growing up in the s with black skin, a white mother; a half-Caucasian, half-Indonesian half-sister in Java; and an absent, unknown African father in Kenya.

But at the end of his process of self-discovery, and notwithstanding his love for his white mother and grandparents, the physiological fact of his black skin proved to be the most important element in his psychological understanding of self. Yet, while appreciating their genius, the teenage Obama despaired that, despite W. One of the first critics to discuss jazz as a political as much as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon, jazz exemplified to Davis a distinctive black, working-class challenge to white claims of racial superiority.

His poetry and criticism would have a significant influence on the Black Arts Movement of the s. Davis, a Kansas native, moved to Hawaii in the late s on the advice of Paul Robeson and worked as a journalist on a newspaper for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, one of the most powerful unions on the islands. Eighteen-year-old Barry Obama remained unsure, exactly, what college was for when he arrived at Occidental College, a small liberal arts college in Los Angeles in At both Occidental and Columbia, Obama was active in student politics, notably in antiapartheid protests, where he first discovered the power of his own oratory.

As his interest in basketball, drinking, partying, and recreational drugs waned, his devotion to academic study waxed. At Columbia he lived a monk-like existence in small, uncluttered apartments, and absorbed himself in books on political theory, philosophy, international politics, and literature. During that time he also began to write fiction and keep a journal, developing some of the ideas and themes that later appear in Dreams from My Father.

Obama graduated from Columbia in with a BA in political science, having developed a vague notion that he might become a community organizer, although he was not entirely sure just what it was that a community organizer did. He did, however, have a romantic image, perhaps in grainy blackand-white, picked up from his mother and his old poet friend Frank, and from books and documentaries of the civil rights struggle.

They were stoic, short-haired, neatly dressed black students sitting in at a segregated lunch counter. Or dungareewearing SNCC workers like Bob Moses or Stokely Carmichael, leaning on a dusty porch in Mississippi, trying to persuade sharecroppers to take a chance and register to vote. His fellow employees from that time have suggested, however, that Obama exaggerates the degree to which the company symbolized rapacious s capitalism, perhaps to portray his community organizing career as a more self-sacrificing choice than it actually was.

But it was the general atmosphere of Manhattan, rather than simply its corporate excesses that Obama rejected when he decided to leave the city in The progressive left of the s, Obama realized, was no less shallow than the capitalist right. Believing that easy sloganeering and posturing had replaced the certitude and rectitude of SNCC and CORE in the early s, Obama contemplated abandoning his goal of community organizing.

The mids heyday of Reaganism was a time of retrenchment in the American labor movement, when industrial firms in the North closed their gates and reopened in the nonunionized South or in Mexico. But it was also a time when such work was most desperately needed. He would find that community and sense of place in Chicago, and especially on its South Side, the largest, most populous collection of African American neighborhoods in the country.

Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton portrayed in a ground-breaking study by that title Chicago was also the home of people-centered, community-based organizing was born after World War II in the theories and programs of Saul Alinsky. In , a Wellesley senior named Hillary Rodham wrote her senior thesis on Alinsky. The Developing Communities Project, which employed Obama from to , followed the Alinsky principles that leaders listen, that change comes from the bottom up, and that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

During his first three years in Chicago, Obama achieved some modest success in mobilizing hundreds of residents in the South Side neighborhoods of Roseland and Altgeld Gardens. He also encouraged alliances among black, white, and Hispanic community organizations to stop plans that would have expanded a landfill into wetlands near residential neighborhoods.

Rush, have criticized him for taking too much credit for the asbestos removal victory at Altgeld Gardens and for ignoring the efforts of neighborhood residents who began a similar campaign before Obama arrived. He was quickly disabused of this notion by his experiences with black ministers who jealously guarded their prerogatives and congregations.

Man, these preachers in Chicago. You are not going to organize us. No, no, no. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item.

Dr marten woudstra biography of barack obama

Dutch-American pastor, theologian, and academic. Early life and education [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. Steve said:. February 18, at pm. John said:. February 28, at pm. Better late than never! Richard M Dasheiff said:. December 2, at pm. Peter Baker had established himself as an excellent writer of political history. He puts situations in prospective and fleshes out the politics and motives.

The acknowledgments section clearly states that this coffee-table, overly illustrated, oversized tome 5 lbs by weight was the creation of the New York Times as a show piece, and not the serious Obama biography that Baker might want to write. Diana Batzel said:. December 20, at pm.