Black Hair, Still Tangled in Politics

HER CALL Michelle Obama and 11-year-old Malia, who wore her hair in twists this summer.
















SILKY straight hair has long been considered by many black women to be their crowning glory. So what if getting that look meant enduring the itchy burning that’s a hallmark of many chemical straighteners. Or a pricey dependence on “creamy crack,” as relaxers are sometimes jokingly called.

Getting “good hair” often means transforming one’s tightly coiled roots; but it is also more freighted, for many African-American women and some men, than simply a choice about grooming. Straightening hair has been perceived as a way to be more acceptable to certain relatives, as well as to the white establishment.

Something I myself contended with: my curly hair didn't seem cool enough, and I tried to straighten it, in ways that years later seemed ridiculous. The crux of it is to look the same as others, to fit in.

“If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed,” the comedian Paul Mooney, sporting an Afro, says in the documentary “Good Hair,” which won a jury prize at the Sundance film festival and comes out in October. “If your hair is nappy, they’re not happy.”

Interactive Feature Tresses of Choice

In the face of cultural pressure, the thinking goes, conformists relax their hair, and rebels have the courage not to. In some corners, relaxing one’s hair is even seen as wishing to be white.

“For black women, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” said Ingrid Banks, an associate professor of black studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “If you’ve got straight hair, you’re pegged as selling out. If you don’t straighten your hair,” she said, “you’re seen as not practicing appropriate grooming practices.”

That seems ridiculous in this day and age, but, obviously, it is not.

Anyone who thought such preconceptions were outdated would have been reminded otherwise by some negative reactions to the president’s 11-year-old daughter, Malia Obama, who wore her hair in twists while in Rome this summer. Commenters on the conservative blog Free Republic attacked her as unfit to represent America for stepping out unstraightened.

That is ridiculous! Unstraightened means black.

Shayna Y. Rudd in Washington.

Bad numbers

These numbers are appalling. The maximum scores are 800 in each category; the overall averages in each category are around 500, barely over 60% of the possible total. This should be considered a national disgrace, and should place the issue at the top of the critical priorities for the nation, instead of so much hot air and hate being spewed about the Second Amendment, purported death panels and the onrush of socialism.

Consider the average black score in the reading category is 100 points less than the average white score; same 100 points in writing; and 160 points than the average Asian score in Math.

Hispanic numbers are marginally better (26, 35, 27 points) than black numbers. Curiously, they exclude Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans, which raises two questions: why? and where are those numbers?

Another story in today's Journal, about a baseball player, contained a parallel number: Torii Hunter grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, as did his half-brother.

Mr. Hunter and Mr. Thurman both graduated from high school, but many of their peers did not. The state's high-school graduation rate for black males is 61%, but only 29% of black students who start high school in Pine Bluff are considered college-ready when they leave, according to Marcus Winters, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

29% of black high school graduates are ready for college; what are the other 71% ready for?

Welcome to the "Club"

He spoke yesterday with Chris Matthews on Hardball, and I found him impressive. BTW, Matthews seems a changed man: he is allowing others to talk at length without interruptions.

A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last July asked: “Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?” Sixty-six percent of black men said yes. Only 9 percent of white men said the same.

These views are not without merit. A series of racial-profiling studies across the country have found that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be stopped and searched than whites.

In fact, last year the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York law firm specializing in human rights, released a damning study of the racial-profiling practices of the New York Police Department. It found that more than 80 percent of those stopped and frisked were black or Hispanic. The report also said that when stopped, 45 percent of blacks and Hispanics were frisked, compared with 29 percent of whites, even though white suspects were 70 percent more likely than black suspects to have a weapon.

It’s such a sensitive issue for black men that even the Black Man in Chief dove into the fray on Wednesday, reiterating that the issue of racial profiling “still haunts us.” So passionate was his empathy that it caused him to err. His comment that the police behaved “stupidly” was not very smart. On Friday, he acknowledged as much.

He describes his own racial profiling incident, when he was in college.

I committed myself to breaking this cycle when I had my own kids. That became impossible the day after Thanksgiving a couple of years ago. A white police officer stopped me when I was in the car with my children. He said that I was using my cellphone while driving. In fact, I had answered a call at a stoplight. When the light turned green, I put the phone away. I thought this was a case that could be debated, so I debated it. That didn’t sit well with the officer. He went back to his car to write up a ticket. When he returned, he had two tickets. The second one, he told me, was for not wearing a seat belt, that he believed I had only put it on as I was being pulled over. That was not true. My kids were flabbergasted. They knew the officer was wrong, so they began to protest. I quieted them. When the officer drove off, I had a frank talk with them.

I told them that although most officers are brave and honorable men and women doing their best to protect and serve, there were, unfortunately, some bad seeds. Although I could not be sure that race had had any bearing on what the officer had done, I felt the need to tell my boys that as black men, we may sometimes take more of the brunt of those bad officers’ actions. As I spoke, my heart sank. Despite my best efforts to prevent it, the cycle of suspicion and mutual mistrust was tumbling forward into yet another generation. My children were one step closer to joining the “club.”

I invite you to visit my blog, By the Numbers. Please also join me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.

Obama: ‘No Excuses’ for Any Failure

President Obama addressed the N.A.A.C.P. convention on the organization's 100th anniversary in New York on Thursday.




Obama Tells Fellow Blacks: ‘No Excuses’ for Any Failure - I don't know that I would say 'fellow blacks.' But it was a rousing speech; he almost preached several times, leaning down into the microphones. It was inspiring to see him, even if he could not resist detailing policy.




President Obama delivered a fiery sermon to black America on Thursday night, warning black parents that they must accept their own responsibilities by “putting away the Xbox and putting our kids to bed at a reasonable hour,” and telling black children that growing up poor is no reason to get bad grades.

Fiery sermon it was.

“No one has written your destiny for you,” he said, directing his remarks to “all the other Barack Obamas out there” who might one day grow up to be president. “Your destiny is in your hands, and don’t you forget that. That’s what we have to teach all of our children! No excuses! No excuses!”

He was one part politician and one part black preacher as he spoke in lilting cadences, his voice quiet at times, thundering at others, in unusually personal terms. At one point, when his audience shouted back at him, repeating his words, he threw back his head and laughed, saying, “I’ve got an amen corner back there.”

It was an unusual moment for a president who has sought to transcend race and has only reluctantly embraced his unique place in history. Six months into his presidency, Mr. Obama has seemed more comfortable embracing his identity as the first black American president overseas than at home, as was the case during his trip to Ghana last week, when he declared, “I have the blood of Africa within me.”

He did, several times, say United States of America, and it was clear he was trying to reconcile both the black audience and the nation: being black is not unAmerican, and being patriotic is not uncool.

Motivator in Chief

Doug Mills/The New York Times First Lady Michele Obama reading to third grade students in an after school program in Washington, DC. this week.


For years, the divide between the White House and the impoverished black and immigrant neighborhoods in the nation’s capital has often seemed insurmountable. But in recent months, Michelle Obama has become something of a human bridge between the two worlds.

Mrs. Obama has repeatedly traveled to Anacostia and other neighborhoods rarely visited by the power elite here in an effort to reach out to young people who are struggling to succeed.

Of course, reaching out to the underprivileged is nothing new for first ladies. And focusing on schools is a safe choice for Mrs. Obama, who has carefully steered clear of controversy.

But Mrs. Obama, the first African-American first lady, is also among the first to emerge from the urban working class, historians say. Her parents never attended college and rented an apartment when she was growing up. At Princeton, she wrote in her senior thesis, she sometimes felt “like a visitor on campus, as if I don’t really belong.”

Is it imaginable seeing Cindy McCain in Anacostia?

At Anacostia High, where children walk through metal detectors every day and only 21 percent of students read proficiently last year, Tiara Chance, 18, was surprised that Mrs. Obama had decided to visit.

“We don’t deserve it,” she said. “People are fighting and cussing all the time around here. Who would want to be around that?”

At Mary’s Center, a health clinic that serves a predominantly immigrant community, Akrem Muzemil, 16, who dreams of becoming an engineer, asked the first lady flat out, “Like, why did you want to come out here to meet us?”

Mrs. Obama told him, “I think it’s real important for young kids, particularly kids from communities without resources, to see me.”

Her office sends signed photographs to the children she has met and has invited some, including Akrem, to visit the White House. And her aides responded affirmatively when Jasmine Williams, a high school senior from a crime-ridden neighborhood, invited the first lady to address her graduation from a charter school dedicated to math and science.

Jasmine burst into tears when she heard the news. For many of these children, Mrs. Obama has provided an incredible boost.

Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow

It's a simple bracelet -- a string of white plastic beads. Every time Mary Etta Madison puts it on, she recalls her days as a young student at a black college in Alabama, and the German-Jewish professor who gave it to her as a gift 57 years ago. Mrs. Madison, 78, a retired school teacher, says the Talladega College professor, Lore Rasmussen, gave her the confidence to pursue her own teaching career.

"I felt very close to her through the years," Mrs. Madison says.
Friendships like these had a cost in the segregated South. One night in 1942, Prof. Rasmussen and her husband were arrested for dining with an African-American in a blacks-only cafe.

There wasn't just segregation that kept blacks apart from whites; it was illegal for the races to mix.

Two jail receipts for $28 each from that night, along with Mrs. Madison's bracelet and dozens of other artifacts, photographs, documents, and paintings are part of an exhibit set to open next week at the Museum of Jewish Heritage -- A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York's Battery Park City. The exhibit illuminates a period during and after World War II when scores of German-Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany found havens teaching in small black colleges throughout the South.

The Jewish scholars who had fled the Nazis and the young black students facing the hardships of the segregated South forged bonds that in many cases lasted long after the students had graduated and the professors had left the South for other posts.
A bond forged out of being victims of hatred.

The exhibit, called "Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow: Jewish Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges," draws on a book of the same name published in 1993 by a German-Jewish refugee, Gabrielle Edgcomb, as well as on research by the museum. A documentary based on the book aired on PBS in 2000.
[Google Books shows: From swastika to Jim Crow : refugee scholars at Black colleges

By Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb.Edition: illustrated. Published by Krieger Pub. Co., 1993

Original from the University of Michigan.Digitized Nov 5, 2008

ISBN 089464775X, 9780894647758. 144 pages]

The exhibit includes a couple valuable artworks, such as "The Gleaners," a large canvas painted in 1943 by John Biggers, showing a group of African-American men and women foraging for coal on a railroad track. Mr. Biggers, a black painter, had an influential German-Jewish mentor, the art educator Viktor Lowenfeld, with whom he studied in the early 1940s at the Hampton Institute, a black college in Virginia.















HWPL owns two books on John Biggers:

Black art in Houston : the Texas Southern University experience : presenting the art of Biggers, Simms and their students. [ART] Q 700.8996 B
Biggers, John Thomas, 1924-
College Station : Texas A & M University Press, c1978. 106 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 29 cm.

The art of John Biggers : view from the upper room. [Art] Q 759.13 Biggers W
Wardlaw, Alvia J. Houston : Museum of Fine Arts, in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1995.
184 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 29 cm.
















A centerpiece of the exhibit chronicles the extraordinarily close bond forged by a former German-Jewish judge and professor, Ernst Borinski, with his students at Tougaloo College , a historic black college in Jackson, Miss. Dr. Borinski had worked as a magistrate in Germany, but fled in 1938. He joined Tougaloo as a sociology professor in 1947, and remained there until his death in 1983. One of his students was Donald Cunnigen, now a sociology professor at the University of Rhode Island. He recalls how Dr. Borinski once penned 27 letters of recommendation to help him obtain a place in a prestigious graduate program.

Could It Really Be Him? Yeah, Probably

GO BULLS! President Obama’s team lost; it may not have bothered 5-year-old Nick Aiello.












Michelle Obama with Jill Biden, center, and Michelle Fenty












THEIR NEW HOMETOWN President Obama at a casual D.C. spot.








During the Bush years, Washington got used to a homebody president who preferred bringing friends into the Executive Mansion to venturing outside it. But these days, President Obama and his wife, Michelle, are popping up all over this city.

The Obamas have gone to parent-teacher conferences, school sporting events and visited working-class and gentrifying communities that have rarely served as stomping grounds for American presidents and first ladies — speaking to students at a charter school in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, and worshiping in a black church, among other activities. (The president and friends also tossed a basketball around at a city-run recreation center.)

Political observers are still debating whether this out-and-about style simply reflects the personal inclinations of the Obamas or some political calculus (or both). But one thing is clear: No other modern president has reached out so widely to so many corners of the city, says Doris Kearns Goodwin, a presidential historian.

That is no surprise to friends of the first family. The Obamas, after all, are city people, former community organizers who have long felt at home in the urban landscape. Mr. Obama is the first president since Richard M. Nixon to be elected while living in a city neighborhood, in his case, Chicago’s racially and economically diverse Hyde Park. And the Obamas are now eager to explore the city beyond the White House walls.

Of course, the social schedule of the president and first lady is also a powerful political tool, a way to nurture political alliances and to cultivate political narratives. The Obamas can enjoy their time out on the town while, at the same time, reaping potential dividends by reinforcing their promise to bring change to Washington and honing an image of openness and accessibility, some Washington watchers say.

Some warn, however, that such a schedule can also carry political risks, particularly if it undermines the mystique of the presidency, the image of power and command that a president needs to enact an ambitious agenda. Americans love the idea of the common man in a position of political power. (Think Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”) But they can also lose some respect if a politician seems too familiar. (Think Jimmy Carter in his cardigan.)

The Obamas know that it’s different. As the first African-American couple in the White House, they want to reach beyond the prosperous, predominantly white corridors of Washington.

“We were taught you have to get to know the community you’re in, and you have to be a part of that community,” Mrs. Obama said during a visit to Mary’s Center, a health clinic that serves a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. “D.C. is our community now, and it’s our home.”

For ordinary people, the unexpected encounters with the new president and first lady are astonishing. Joe Clark, a corporate lawyer who sat near the president at the basketball game, described the experience as “surreal.”

“I couldn’t believe that he was so accessible that I could literally shake his hand and heckle him about needing to suit up because his team was losing,” Mr. Clark said.

That is not to say that the Obamas can live anything close to a normal life here.

Mrs. Obama and her staff also visited Miriam’s Kitchen, a soup kitchen, where the first lady bumped into Bill Richardson, a 46-year-old homeless man. Mr. Richardson was so stunned that he could barely stammer thank you as Mrs. Obama scooped a helping of mushroom risotto onto his plate this month. “I was expecting some lunch, but this is the president’s wife; this is her right here,” said Mr. Richardson, who said he planned to get to a phone as soon as he could. “I’m going to be like, ‘Mom, you’re never going to guess who I’ve seen.’ ”

When Life Is Just a Bowl of Freebies

No one knows who will win Thursday night's Bowl Championship Series National Championship game between Florida and Oklahoma. But one thing's for sure: Players on both teams will walk away with some pretty nice swag. That's because the bowls now give out gift bags just like the Oscars. It's one of the few times of the year when college athletes are allowed to accept gifts. And this year, Miami, host to the Orange Bowl and the BCS title game, was the place to be. Players in both bowl games were allowed to stroll through the Sony Suite, an exclusive room at their hotel stocked with Sony Electronics products. Each player had a $300 credit limit. Players picked out the items they wanted, including PlayStations and flat-screen TVs, and Sony shipped them wherever they wanted. Participating schools also typically order extra gift bags for big-donor alumni and other VIPs they bring to the games.

It is self-evident that what matters is money.

Gift bags are just one example of how these bowl games, originally designed to promote tourism, have become multimillion-dollar enterprises in their own right. Revenues for the 34 postseason bowl games range from just over $1 million for the R&L Carriers New Orleans Bowl to more than $30 million for each of the five BCS games. College bowl games are an estimated $400 million-a-year industry, and more than 20 of the bowl games have tax-exempt status.

According to a survey last year by Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal, the Chick-fil-A Bowl is the most profitable. This year marked its 12th-straight sell out, generating a roughly $2 million profit on about $12 million in revenue and $10 million in expenses. Revenue has risen more than 70% over the past decade, a marked improvement from the 1990s when the bowl actually lost money. Bowl executives don't do badly either, with most getting six-figure salaries. Based on 2006 tax returns, the Sugar Bowl's Paul Hoolahan makes more than $450,000 a year, the Outback Bowl's Jim McVay nearly $500,000, and Fiesta and Insight Bowl Director John Junker more than $400,000.

Money for everyone, schools included. But, what is the cost?

And while everyone's fretting over the bailout package for the auto industry, most taxpayers would be shocked to learn that they're also footing the bill for some of these highly profitable bowl games. From 2001 to 2005, seven tax-exempt bowls received $21.6 million in government aid. The Sugar Bowl, which in one four-year period got $4.1 million in funding from the Louisiana Department of Economic Development, pays a consultant more than $10,000 a year to "monitor legislative developments . . . related to the continued financial support of the Sugar Bowl." From 2001 to 2005, 38% of the Brut Sun Bowl's total revenue, or about $9 million, came from receipts from a Texas rental-car tax that are diverted into the bowl's bank account.

Yes, the bowls are tax-exempt. Why? Back scratching; also called corruption. But that is not the only cost.

In short, the college bowl games generate some pretty impressive numbers. But Derrick Jackson, a columnist for the Boston Globe, comes up with his own numbers each year: The bowl teams' graduation rates.

"Florida has a 68 percent graduation rate but a 25-percentage-point racial disparity," he wrote in his Dec. 13, 2008, column. "Oklahoma should flat-out be disqualified with a 46 percent graduation rate."

Less than half graduate.

Mr. Jackson also found that four other schools that played in BCS bowl games – Ohio State, Texas, Alabama and Utah – all have black graduation rates under 50% and an average racial gap of 30 percentage points.


Watching the Oklahoma-Florida, game, I saw that Florida's top receiver is majoring in Sports recreational management. O, yes, indeed.

DEPARTMENT OF TOURISM, RECREATION AND SPORT MANAGEMENT
COLLEGE OF HEALTH AND HUMAN PERFORMANCE
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

That is from a course syllabus: LEI 4501: Legal Aspects of Recreation, Parks and Tourism (3 Credits)

The University indeed has a department of Recreational Sports.

Proud of Obama … For Now

For now? That seems a little tough, to say the least. The man has not even taken office.

I am proud Obama’s team mounted an innovative 21st century campaign that left many of us scratching our heads in 20th century bemusement.

Yes, he ran an innovative, focused, tech-savvy campaign.

To put it simply: black America is not doing well.

After asserting that we are in a post-civil rights era, he quotes Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage. In The American Scholar magazine, Johnson argues in a recent cover story that “a new century calls for new stories grounded in the present, leaving behind the painful history of slavery and its consequences.”

And he seems to be in agreement with Johnson. Yet, there are doubts in his mind.

Even as Obama reached new voters, anti-affirmative action referenda passed in Nebraska and barely lost in Colorado. Similar measures have passed in four other states.

Affirmative action remains of importance to black Americans, he asserts, even as Obama's election proves we are in a new age. So, which is it?

Our peculiar political calculus prevented candidate Obama from candidly addressing issues of racial justice during the campaign. Any hint of racial grievance coming from a black candidate could have provoked a white electoral backlash, and the Obama team assiduously avoided that possibility.

Agreed.

But Obama is no longer just a symbol of black America’s racial aspirations. The African-American candidate may not have been free to speak about the incarceration epidemic among black youth, or the enormous collateral damage of the war on drugs, but President Obama must be held accountable for policies that exacerbate those problems.

Well, he'll be accountable for everything; that's the nature of the Presidency, always, all the more in these times.

The sheer novelty of his status as the first black president probably will give him a long political honeymoon in the African-American community. However, when those first arguments inevitably begin, this period of tear-stained joy will gain a glow of  nostalgia.

I fail to see the point, other than expecting Obama to be perfect. Tall order.

An Old Hometown Mentor, and Still at Obama’s Side

An interesting piece. I particularly liked this sentence:

“What Valerie developed is the art of telling people to go to hell and making them look forward to the trip,” said Mr. Jordan, who advised his wife’s cousin throughout the campaign.

I remember Vernon Jordan in the Urban League ages ago. He has moved up inot the stratosphere of American politics.

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

BY HIS SIDE Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett getting lunch last week in Chicago. Ms. Jarrett took Mr. Obama under her wing nearly two decades ago.

Black Power

Now that Obama is president, some of his friends are in a position to exert influence at the highest levels of American society.

For more than a decade, Mr. Obama has cultivated ties with a growing circle of black power brokers who are poised – and eager – to wield greater national influence. Some of these insiders stand to gain new status in an Obama administration, and many more in law firms, big corporations and on Wall Street. They believe that their proximity to the president-elect will burnish their reputations, much in the way that white elites always have leveraged connections in business and politics.

Emphasis added to make this point: same game, new players.

Many are now eyeing Washington – for jobs and less-formal resumé-boosting roles. "These black executives see a window of opportunity for themselves," says Peniel Joseph, a black professor of political science at Brandeis University. "Obama being elected president shatters the last glass ceiling."

It is a new age. Yet some things won't change too much. People want in, to get power and influence.

Of those hoping for access and government stints, some may be disappointed. Loyalties aside, Mr. Obama, according to people familiar with his thinking, may be constrained in the number of blacks he appoints to avoid any charges of favoring African-Americans.

Constrained? It seems way early to speculate, though that is not stopping anyone from doing it. Still, look at his campaign to see how he thinks, how he operates.

Other blacks, meanwhile, complain that they have been shut out altogether. Absent from the senator's advisory circle, for instance, are the civil-rights leaders and ministers who figured prominently in the candidacies of an older generation of black politicians such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson. "There is no one who represents the black inner city, who is rooted in the black community," says the Rev. Eugene Rivers, an influential black Boston minister. "It's the whole black Brahmin thing: Vote for us because we're better than you."

Jealousy rears its head. Obama is of a new generation. He might not be from the ghetto, but to say he is not of the black community seems ridiculous.

Obama supporters point out that the senator himself worked as a community organizer in a black Chicago neighborhood. "There are a lot of ways other than being from the street to be tough and have wisdom," says Martin Nesbitt, a Chicago real-estate developer and close friend.

... the spotlight has shifted to a new cadre of African-Americans in their 40s and 50s. Their growing visibility is already changing the tone of Washington and creating new power matrixes. For example, Eric Holder – who helped conduct Mr. Obama's search for a vice president and is considered by people close to the campaign as a candidate for attorney general – met Mr. Obama two years ago at a Washington dinner party organized by Ann Walker Marchant. Ms. Marchant is a black former Clinton administration official who is also the niece of Mr. Jordan and a cousin of Ms. Jarrett.

Intricate ties. Again, same game, new players.

Judith Byrd, 52, a graduate of Georgetown Law School, first met Mr. Obama during his early career days, in the 1980s. Back then, he was a community organizer and she was a city official. At a meeting where he was leading local opposition to landfills, Ms. Byrd recalls "my head whipping around as he spoke because of the conviction and clarity with which he was making his case."

Not the first one to say the same thing.

In 2004 she introduced Mr. Obama to her husband, Ron Blaylock, 48, an African-American veteran of Citigroup and UBS who now runs a private-equity fund. Backing their friend's political efforts, the couple quickly ramped up their social network for fund-raising events. One gathering, held this spring, was at the Park Avenue home of a friend. The invitation list consisted of friends and clients as well as colleagues from the predominantly white, A-list nonprofit boards on which they've served: Georgetown and New York Universities, Carnegie Hall, the American Ballet Theater. The event raised $370,000. "That's our existing network," says Mr. Blaylock. "Our friends and the people we associate with every day are mixed, of all races. It's not all black."

All the same circle.

Chicago provides the oldest and closest circle of black business executives around Mr. Obama. Many have benefited from the historically strong black business community and the 1983 election of the city's first black mayor, Harold Washington, who appointed many African-Americans to city posts.

Interesting. No such thing seem obvious in New York.

Harvard Law School is another nexus of influence, having played a key role in expanding the African-American power base. Since it began accepting blacks in large numbers in 1968, Harvard has typically admitted 30 to 40 black law students a year, according to David Wilkins, a Harvard Law professor who has tracked the numbers. In 2000, Mr. Wilkins organized a reunion of black graduates and found there were 1,400 black alumni – more black law-school graduates than any other law school except historically black Howard University.

Fascinating.

"Harvard Law School has always produced an influential network....Now blacks are part of that network," says Rep. Artur Davis (D., Ala.), who attended law school with Mr. Obama.

Same game, different players.

Some blacks believe that a larger ripple effect is under way – that Mr. Obama's ascendancy is affecting, for instance, things like the number of black commentators appearing on cable-TV news shows. Says Ms. Butts: "You will see changes in Washington, D.C., where people are making decisions about who is running a news bureau, who is heading up a lobbying shop," bringing in more blacks to top positions.

This election "isn't going to change everything," says Harvard's Mr. Wilkins. "But it is going to change the way people understand power. It changes the view of who could be an important person."

Sense of Unease in Some Black Voters

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — For weeks now, James Jones has been extra courteous in traffic and at the gas station because he has an Obama sticker on the back of his truck. “Something like that might make a difference for Barack Obama,” Mr. Jones explained. “I’m not taking a chance.”

I never did get my car magnet, and I'm disappointed.

in conversations with about a dozen Jacksonville residents in cafes, outside churches and at their homes over three days, Mr. Jones and many of his black neighbors worry anyway, unable to put aside the nagging feeling that somehow their votes will not be counted.

Florida was a key in the 2000 election results.

Wounds have not healed here in Duval County since the mangled presidential election of 2000, when more than 26,000 ballots were discarded as invalid for being improperly punched. Nearly 40 percent of the votes were thrown out in the predominantly Democratic-leaning African-American communities around Jacksonville, a reality that has caused suspicions of racial bias to linger, even though intentional disenfranchisement was never proved.

26 thousand votes would have elected Al Gore.

But amid excitement over Mr. Obama’s historic candidacy and the chance that the country might choose an African-American president within a matter of days, there is an unmistakable sense of anxiety among blacks here that something will go wrong, that victory will slip away.






James Jones, an Obama supporter, at his home in Jacksonville, Fla., with his wife, Mary, and two of their three sons, James Jr., left, and Anthony.

Potomac-Land apology

Even Jesse Jackson apologizes. This is an incident which provides a glaring contrasts between generations. Story headline is Jesse Jackson Apologizes for Remarks on Obama.

Mr. Jackson, before an interview with a Fox News anchor on a different topic, sharply criticized Mr. Obama for how he has been referring to African-Americans. He specifically took issue with how Mr. Obama had singled out black men in recent speeches for failing to uphold their responsibility as fathers.

Jackson is in his sixties, Obama in his forties. But more than age, it is a generational outlook and attitude that is at play here: Jesse comes from the Civil Rights struggle, from Operation PUSH, from when black people had to fight for their rights; Barack comes from the post-Civil Rights age, and is a politician who is running for president and has a serious chance to win.

Mr. Jackson, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, has been a supporter of Mr. Obama. He has played no formal role in the campaign, but tensions have occasionally flared behind the scenes with Mr. Jackson, who is known for his outspokenness and his penchant for drawing attention to himself.

That last phrase is key: perhaps there is an element of jealousy at play: Jesse always had to be the center of attention, and is not now.

Mr. Obama’s candidacy has served as an example of a generational and stylistic shift in black political leadership in America. The remarks drew an unusually stern rebuke from Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., Democrat of Illinois, who also serves as a national co-chairman of Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign.

“Reverend Jackson is my dad, and I’ll always love him,” the congressman said Wednesday evening in a statement. He added, “I thoroughly reject and repudiate his ugly rhetoric. He should keep hope alive and any personal attacks and insults to himself.”

That is a stinging rebuke. Deserved.