OBAMA: A MAN WITH A DREAM
35-minutes, 2008
Ref: 699

No Preview Video Available
"They’re afraid of a funny name and a face that doesn’t look like the one on the dollar bill". This was how Barack Obama, who may be the next President of the United States, responded to his critics. The path towards what might be America’s first black president has been painful but also remarkably swift. Just 44 years ago, at the 1964 Democratic Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer, a woman brought up in the tough cotton fields of the South, denounced that Mississippi blacks were unrepresented. The plantation owners fired blacks if they dared vote and the Ku Klux Klan terrorized and killed blacks with total impunity. A civil rights leader had been born who was later to be overshadowed by Martin Luther King. Forty years later, at the 2004 Democratic Convention, another unknown - Barack Obama - set the convention hall and nation alight when he recalled that he was a product of the American Dream but just happened to be black. Another leader was born, a product of the struggle for civil rights, for whom race was not the only issue. The road ahead is a long one. The injustice denounced by Fannie Lou Hamer in her native Mississippi has changed little in some respects. Blacks continue to suffer the scourges of poverty, ill health, low education standards, and crime more than any other ethnic group. The hope that a black president can change this has made many blacks—and even whites who have suffered from Bush’s ultra-liberal policies—believe in Obama’s promises for change. Obama has cleverly used the fact that he has both black and white blood and has been adroit in his references to Martin Luther King and JFK.