They had all come to witness Barack Hussein Obama, a 47-year-old Black man, accept the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party – which, 148 years ago – was the political home of Jefferson Davis.
Davis was an American traitor who quit Congress to become president of the Confederate States of America, which launched the Civil War. He once said that slavery was“ a form of civil government for those who by their nature are not fit to govern themselves.” Given that mindset, Davis surely would have cringed when Obama took to the stadium’ s stage on the evening of August 28, 2008, to give his acceptance speech.
“ It’ s been a long time coming. But tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America,” Obama said to the nearly 84,000 people inside the stadium, and 38.4 million who watched on television.
A little more than two months later, 61.6 million people – the highest voter turnout in 40 years – went to the polls and elected Obama the 44th president of the United States. Obama’ s election came 232 years after this nation was created as a democracy rooted in the apartheid principles that made Black people three-fifths of a person and slavery an appendage of the American democracy.
Barack Obama
He became the nation’ s first Black president 148 years after the Civil War was launched to defend the right of a region of this country to perpetuate the enslavement of people of African descent, and just 40 years after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of a nonviolent campaign for racial justice in America.
The election of the nation’ s first Black president came just 43 years after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which made illegal poll taxes and literacy tests – hurdles that were used to keep Black people from voting.
In the year after the Voting Rights Act became law, Black voter
registration soared. For example, in Alabama, it rose to 51 percent from 11 percent; and in Tennessee it jumped to 72 percent from 27 percent. The voter registration efforts of Jesse Jackson’ s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns further increased Black voter registration.
But it was the Democratic Party’ s selection of Obama as its presidential candidate that made Black voter turnout skyrocket.
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