What Will an Obama Presidency do to Victimization Activists?

Rosa Parks, on December 1, 1955 refused to yield her bus seat to a white bus driver who demanded she move to the back of the bus. With her simple act of defiance, she propelled her legacy as the mother of the Civil Rights movement.

In those days, Jim Crow laws were in place since the post-Civil War Reconstruction, and required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations throughout the South, while legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept African-Americans out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.

In those days, African-American Senators or Congressman, Supreme Court Justices, Secretaries of State, Corporate CEO’s and many successful business entrepreneurs, and now African-American Presidential nominees for major political party(s) did not exist.

This raises a serious question: Is the civil rights movement shrinking in the face of progress in its cause? Of course, as it should, this is called “progress”. However, the public moneys to achieve civil rights will also shrink as the movement continues to make giant strides forward.

It begs another question however; what will the Jesse Jacksons and other civil rights leaders do with their organizations as their influence in civil rights shrink with the fleeting need for their guidance and leadership. As their organizations shrinks, how will they make a difference, no less a living?

Will they all have to go out and get real jobs? That’s a job that, like most of us, is a job in the private sector and is based on our capitalistic economic realities.

It raises a question and seeds the possibility that these individuals and movements, when viewed strictly from the point of view of the survival of the movement and the financing that affords their place in it, really have more to lose with an Obama Presidency then an Obama loss.

With a win, they will have a hard time convincing people that African-Americans need:

1. Affirmative action (beyond what whites and other minorities need) and
2. Civil rights marches and rallies.

With an Obama loss, they can:

1. Continue to argue that they still live in a state of victimization.
2. Need more attention to African-American advancement
3. Make larger issues of lesser matters because they touch minorities
4. Continue to live as they have since Rosa Parks gave them legs.

In closing, I’d like to pose a very simple question, please let us know what you think.

July 10, 2008
By M Jay Hamada

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