Do African Americans Need a Black President? Of Movements, Not Men

Abstract

President Barack Obama likely has no bigger defender in Congress than Representative Frederica Wilson of Florida. A veteran state legislator before being elected to Congress in 2010, Wilson’s relationship to Obama is characteristic of the deep affinity that millions of African Americans have for the first black president. For Wilson, a former school principal, that attachment runs through Obama to the hundreds of African American males she has assisted in gaining entry into colleges through her mentoring program. By her own reckoning, Wilson was the first elected official in Florida to endorse Obama. Obama’s election was a “prophecy fulfilled” that she had been inculcating in young black men for decades. “I tell my boys all the time, you can be anything you want to be. You can be President of the United States,” Wilson said proudly on a humid September afternoon in her office on Capitol Hill.1 Wilson was one of Florida’s electors to the Electoral College; she took two hundred of her young mentees to the state capital to witness the signing ceremony for Florida’s electors.2 This is the kind of undeniable pride that Obama’s election engendered among African Americans, especially those like Wilson, who had spent decades in the civil rights and political arenas and understood well the arc of history represented by Obama’s victory.