Barack Obama Is Not a Threat

William Jelani Cobb, writing in last Sunday's Outlook section, argued that Barack Obama has a "tortured relationship with black civil rights leaders" because his candidacy threatens us. Cobb cited my comments about Obama's need to respond to the Jena Six case and to bolster "hope with substance" as evidence of my criticism of the candidate.

A serious analysis of Obama's campaign looks not just at the dynamics of 2008. It requires an understanding of the evolution of the civil rights movement and its historical relationship with political leaders. And, from that perspective, Obama represents an enhancement of today's civil rights leadership and our historical struggle.

Obama does not define himself as a civil rights leader -- he is running on a different track to the White House. But he is nonetheless a beneficiary of this great social movement. Remember, we are just 54 years from the Brown v. Board of Education decision that struck down Jim Crow segregation and opened new opportunities to people of color. We are just 44 years from passage of the Voting Rights Act, which curbed racial discrimination at the polls.

The accumulated accomplishments of the civil rights movement made it possible for African Americans, and women and other people of color, to run for the presidency of the United States. The movement made it possible for America to embrace the prospect of an African American or a woman or a Latino in the highest office in the land.

Indeed, when Obama won the Iowa caucuses, I said, "Dr. King would be proud of Barack Obama today. He would be proud of America."

I have supported Obama's campaign since early on. But civil rights leaders have always played a somewhat separate role from presidential candidates. Free from the constraints of sound bites and pollsters and the politics of compromise, we are able to speak truth to power and apply positive leverage to get inequality issues on the candidates' agendas. In 1968, pressure from civil rights leaders led to the Fair Housing Act. In 2008, we are pushing for solutions to the sub-prime mortgage and housing-foreclosure crisis. The civil rights leaders of the '60s spoke against a range of structural inequalities. Today, we decry the fact that black men make up over half of the prison population, while race gaps persist in educational achievement, employment, infant mortality, life expectancy and nearly every other social, economic and political category of American life. We protest a decidedly unjust war that is draining resources that should be used to renew a "war on poverty" at home. The demand for equanomics -- measurable racial and economic equality -- is as necessary today as it was 40 years ago.

Obama and Hillary Clinton and John Edwards need today's civil rights movement to help orient their candidacies' moral compass and define their priorities. The civil rights movement, meanwhile, needs presidential candidates who will champion our agenda and work to turn it into the law of the land.

This is not a "tortured relationship." In fact, it is very much like the partnership between Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson. It took the interplay between demonstration, litigation and legislation to realize the victories of the civil rights struggle of the 1960's. King challenged Johnson to address social inequalities at a time when the president believed he couldn't. And King needed Johnson -- and Congress and the courts -- to see that the civil rights agenda was implemented.

It took two types of leadership then, and until our society is free of inequalities, both types of leadership will still be in order.

The writer is head of the nonprofit RainbowPUSH Coalition.