The Rev. Joseph Lowery had heard the stories about the bright young senator from Illinois. He heard the sound bites and glanced at speeches, but Lowery had never laid eyes on Barack Obama.
On March 4, 2007, Lowery was scheduled to deliver a speech marking Bloody Sunday at the First Baptist Church in Selma, Ala. A half mile away, at Brown Chapel A.M.E Church — where battered marchers sought refuge in 1965 — Obama, fresh off announcing that he wanted to be the nation’s 44th president, was scheduled to speak.
Lowery canceled his speech and made his way to Brown Chapel to hear Obama.
“That is when I heard what I recognized: the running similarities between Obama and Martin Luther King Jr.,” said Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King. “I started supporting Obama because he reminded me of Martin. His intellect. His concern for people. His vision. His scholarship. All of those things were common in both him and Martin.”
On Monday, the link between Obama and King will be symbolically sealed when the president takes the oath of office on a Bible once owned by King on the national holiday honoring King. (Obama will also use a Bible that belonged to Abraham Lincoln.)
“It is destiny that has brought these two people together,” Lowery said. “People see in Barack what they saw in Martin — charisma, vision and commitment to dedication.”
The comparisons today — like in 2007 — will be inevitable and predictable.
Both King and Obama, through religion and politics, gathered cross-cultural good will to build broad coalitions, which led one to civil rights triumphs, the other to the White House. Like King, Obama is highly educated and can captivate millions with soaring rhetoric. And although they both won Nobel Peace Prizes, Obama and King each has his share of critics — both black and white.
In his latest book, “Martin’s Dream,” released last week, King historian Clayborne Carson devoted a chapter to the King-Obama dynamic. Focusing primarily on Obama’s speech to dedicate the new King National Memorial in October, Carson noted that Obama “appreciated the complexities of King’s historical role” because “he understood that King’s Dream encompassed not simply civil rights reforms but a basic reordering of American values and a restructuring of American society.”
“I think it is obvious to anyone who listens to Obama to notice how much King seems to have effected his way of thinking,” said Carson, the director of the King Research and Educational Institute at Stanford University.
Obama belongs to the generation that, while born at the height of the civil rights movement, came of age after it. He grew up hearing his mother tell him stories about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and King, but instead of civil rights, he went into community organizing, then politics.
“The generation that came afterward was trying to come of age at the time when the heroic accomplishments of ending Jim Crow were in the past,” Carson said. “So they were trying to determine what role they should take in this society.”
Carson said that during the 2008 campaign, perhaps starting with the Brown Chapel speech, Obama started to link himself with King, but delicately, “without alienating white Americans who are not comfortable.”
“Sometimes he wants to play it down, and the closer he came to the presidency the less you heard,” Carson said. “When he accepted the nomination in Denver, you heard echoes of King. But when he assumed the presidency, the more he became president, the less he wanted to identify with King’s legacy because he wants to avoid being seen as the president of black America.”
Lowery, who campaigned extensively for Obama in 2008 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, said Obama has had to navigate choppy waters that other presidents have not had to face — partly because of his race.
“Obama had severe hindrances like the tea party and the Republican Party, people who would rather see the country go down the drain than see Obama succeed,” he said.
King, Lowery said, experienced the same thing.
“But it was not the political situation. The civil rights arena was different from the political arena,” Lowery said. “People who didn’t want King to succeed were people not committed to a higher ground.”
By the time King was assassinated in 1968, he had expanded the scope of his outreach. Instead of just civil rights, he started talking about poverty and ending an unpopular war — two areas some say Obama has struggled to address.
“Any president has an eye toward making the quality of life better for Americans. That means eliminating poverty,” said presidential historian Marilyn A. Davis, who has taught political science at Spelman College for 32 years. “But sometimes money for war takes away from that other goal. Those ideas of ending war and eliminating poverty were real in Dr. King and in the philosophy and actions of Obama.”
Which begs the question, what would King think about the actual job that Obama is doing now?
Lowery said King would not be satisfied but would have recognized Obama’s obstacles. Davis and Carson agree.
“Of course he would not be satisfied. I am not satisfied. I came to Obama’s inauguration and supported him, but that doesn’t mean I am not a critic,” Carson said. “If King were around, he would be critical of war policies and the lack of action on poverty. But he would applaud him for health care. It would definitely be a mixed message. He would say, ‘Thanks, but we would like to see you do more.’ ”
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