When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present by Nick Bryant

Author:Nick Bryant [Bryant, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, American Government, National, Biography & Autobiography, Presidents & Heads of State, General, Language Arts & Disciplines, Journalism, History, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies)
ISBN: 9781472985491
Google: QVAKEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2021-03-04T21:47:48+00:00

5

No You Can’t

‘Yes we can!’ came the chants of affirmation, as revellers streamed into Lafayette Square opposite the White House, waving the Stars and Stripes as if they were finish-line chequered flags, and holding aloft ‘Obama/Biden’ placards like golden trophies. ‘Yes we can!’

Washington can be a joyless city: one familiar with presidential comings and goings, one where passions tend to converge rather than originate. Yet when news spread through its streets that for the first time in the country’s 232-year history a black man would occupy a White House built by slaves, the capital erupted. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue became the impromptu venue for a street party. In the minds of the revellers who gathered at his gates, George W. Bush had already been evicted from the Executive Mansion. That night it was impossible to sleep for the ceaseless din of blaring horns. For those inspired by the young senator’s audacious candidacy, this was the moment, to borrow from Seamus Heaney, when hope and history rhymed.

Back in 1961, the year of Barack Obama’s birth, Washington remained for the most part a Jim Crow city in which racism was endemic: the rail terminus where Negro passengers arriving from the north were forced to leave their integrated carriages at Union Station to board segregated trains if they wanted to continue their journeys south; a place where the few black congressmen on Capitol Hill were barred from swimming in the ‘whites only’ members’ pool.

Even in 2008 it remained a dishearteningly segregated city, in which white residents tended to congregate in its north-west quadrant, a safe distance from the old black ghettoes. So the joyfulness was most keenly felt amongst Washington’s majority African-American population, who continued to be deprived of a lawmaker to represent them in the House of Representatives or the Senate – a constitutionally mandated act of voter suppression – but who would soon have a president to call their own.

Ahead of Election Night, I was told to prepare two reports that could run the instant a winner was declared: one for President-elect John McCain and one for President-elect Barack Obama. Since his defeat was all but inevitable, I didn’t even put pen to paper for the Arizona senator, although our coverage afterwards would reflect on how his decency and refusal to play the race card contributed to his own demise. Finding words to describe Obama’s victory posed a unique challenge, since they were freighted with so much history and would be broadcast all over the world, including in his father’s homeland in Kenya. From a personal point of view, it also felt like I was drafting the concluding chapter of a story I had been covering for much of my adulthood – a coda, in all honesty, that I often doubted would be composed in my lifetime.

The viability of an African-American politician as a presidential candidate was a subject of such personal fascination because I had spent years conducting research into the struggle for black equality. As part of that academic journey,

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