Barack obama becomes the first african american presidential nominee in us history

In 2004, I sat in a ballroom in Chicago filled with members of the US Hispanic Leadership Institute for a luncheon with a little known Illinois state senator named Barack Obama. I had no idea who he was at the time (I was visiting from my home in Los Angeles), so I turned to the person sitting next to me, who happened to be one of the conference organizers. A Chicago native, she was all excited about him and said something to me that at the time I honestly didn’t believe: “they’re even talking about him running for President in 2008.”

To be completely honest with you, the whole reason I didn’t believe he would run for president is because I thought that given the history of all the Black presidential candidates that preceded him, his prospect of winning the nomination were dim. All presidential candidates, regardless of race, form exploratory commissions to determine whether a candidate’s run for president is viable, so I figured Barack Obama would do the same, see that it wouldn’t go far, and quit.

My reasoning was based entirely in fact. The first African American presidential candidate in US history, Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (who also happened to be the first African-American woman elected to Congress) ran in 1972 and received just 152 first-ballot votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. The Reverend Jesse Jackson followed with two failed attempt at clinching the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1988, garnering 466 delegates at the 1984 DNC, and 1,219 at the1988 DNC, far more than any other candidate until Barack Obama.

Carol Moseley Braun, the first and only African American woman elected to the United States Senate, ran for president in 2004, but dropped out and endorsed Howard Dean. The always controversial Al Sharpton ran in 2004 as well, but quickly dropped out and endorsed John Kerry.

It was not without reason that I didn’t believe he would run, considering the history. But it is amazing that he won the nomination, as he took on Hillary Clinton and her political machine, winning what many believed was her nomination to lose. In a nation that is on many occasions and issues staunchly divided along racial lines and contentious about race relations, I am proud that even in a party with whom I disagree with on many issues, the party unified behind a Black man whose message attracted primary voters of all races from the fifty states and Puerto Rico.

Consider this fact: the Democratic party overall is 65 percent white and 35 percent non-white (ABC News, Aug. 17, 2008). If its voters towed the racial line as we as a nation have done on so many occasions, Barack Obama would be in a position of supporting a white Democrat nominee for president, rather than accepting the nomination from his party, which is predominantly white (as are the Republican Party and the nation, for now).

Whether you support Mr. Obama or not, his nomination is nothing short of a milestone. He has done what no other African American in the history of the US has been able to do: secure a chance at winning the presidency of a nation that is experiencing an increase in workforce diversity and whose population is becoming more diverse each day. But bear in mind, he did not win this nomination solely on the votes of Democrat minority voters.

The only way he could have statistically won the nomination is by winning a large portion of the white voting bloc in nearly every state in the union. Apparently many white voters, more than 40 years after his death, have embraced Dr. King’s dream of a nation where men and women are not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.