African American Political Thought and American Culture

Abstract

On March 18, 2008, a US Democratic senator and presidential candidate from Illinois named Barack Obama delivered the most important public speech on American racial inequality in the post-Civil Rights era. Distancing himself from controversial comments made by his African American pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who saw American foreign policy hubris in the Middle East as responsible for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Obama told his Philadelphia audience that race still mattered. Slavery contaminated the democratic aspirations of the American founding, and its post-Jim Crow legacies continued to stifle equal opportunity for African Americans. “The past was not past,” Obama declared, because “segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education... and legalized discrimination—where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages … helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white.”1