Obama's Appeal to Blacks Remains an Open Question

"I've never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe," Obama wrote in his latest book, "The Audacity of Hope," in which he also observed that he has "blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac."

Still, Obama chose to build his political career by rooting himself in the black community. In 1983, not long after resigning from a high-powered financial consultant's post in Manhattan, he moved to Chicago as a $10,000-a-year organizer for the Calumet Community Religious Conference. Dressed casually, he would visit barbershops and cruise the main thoroughfares in his used car to get a feel for the South Side.

He left Chicago to attend Harvard Law School and then returned to head a statewide voter-registration effort before joining a small civil rights law firm. In 1996, he was elected to the Illinois Senate from a mostly black South Side district.

Obama and his wife, Michelle, another black lawyer, were married at the predominantly black Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. "He had built himself a base among black voters on the South Side," said Timuel D. Black, professor emeritus at City Colleges of Chicago.

Despite his record of grass-roots work, questions about Obama's racial credentials formed a critical subplot for his ill-fated primary challenge of Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.) in 2000. Rush, a former Black Panther, appeared politically wounded after failing badly in his campaign to unseat Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley the year before. But Rush trounced Obama 2 to 1, and the congressman was joined on primary night by Jackson, who had endorsed him.

Rush won in part by depicting Obama as a Harvard elitist who was out of touch with the concerns of workaday African Americans. More suspect for some voters was that Obama lived in racially mixed and largely upscale Hyde Park and was teaching law part time at the University of Chicago, which is widely viewed as being disconnected from the poor South Side communities nearby.

"There were elements within the African American community who might have suggested 'Well, he's from Hyde Park' or 'He went to Harvard' or 'He was born in Hawaii, so he might not be black enough,' " Obama told the Chicago Tribune.

Those questions were intensified by Obama's unusual heritage, according to other observers. Kwame Raoul, a Haitian American who now fills Obama's former seat in the state Senate, said he too has encountered skepticism from black voters for his ethnic background and for his name.

"When I first decided to run for office and circulate petitions, people would say: 'Kwame Raoul? I'm not voting for a foreigner,' " he said. "I'm certain that before people knew who Barack Obama was, he had to deal with the same thing."

Four years after losing to Rush, Obama cruised to a lopsided victory during a U.S. Senate run in which the campaigns of his major primary and general election opponents imploded in scandal. Still, the issue of his heritage was raised by Alan Keyes, the black radio host and conservative activist brought in late by the Republican Party to oppose Obama.

During the campaign, Keyes argued that the government should pay reparations to descendants of slaves -- pointedly observing that Obama would not qualify under his proposal. When the question of race was raised in that campaign, Obama frequently responded with a practiced line. "I'm rooted in the African American community," he would say. "But I'm not limited by it."

Keyes's broadside had little effect as Obama won his Senate seat with strong support in many parts of the state, including in the black precincts where he had been drubbed in his race for the House. Now, as Obama moves closer to formalizing his presidential campaign, he is sure to be confronted with more questions about his racial identity. Through his staff, Obama declined to comment.

"This is a question Senator Obama has had to answer many times during his career," said Tommy Vietor, Obama's press secretary. ". . . He's consistently proved that he hasn't forgotten the communities he's worked with so far, and certainly won't in the future."

In Chicago's storied Bronzeville neighborhood, African Americans asked about his candidacy mainly expressed excitement. Browsing through Afrocentric Book Store, Nathan Unger, 63, stopped to say that he wants Obama to run although he harbors few illusions about how much Obama would be able to focus on the concerns of black voters.

"Even if we get 30 percent from Obama, we're not going to get that from anybody else," Unger said. "From white folks, we might get 10 percent. What I worry about is that we might want too much from him. It's not just about us out here; it's about everybody."

Political researcher Zachary A. Goldfarb, staff researcher Julie Tate and polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this report.