My grandfather was born in Mississippi in 1930, a time when State-sanctioned segregation, violence against Black people, and the threat of lynching were widespread. He even had to move to a different county after finishing middle school, as the county he was born and raised in did not have a high school for Black people. Additionally, a man in the tiny town of 1,000 people where he lived was lynched when he was a boy. When Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in 2008, my grandfather was astounded that he lived to see this moment. He could not have imagined the prospect of a black President leading the country and a black family living in the White House as legitimate possibilities in his lifetime.
Barack Obama was not the first Black American to run for President; he was preceded by Shirley Chisholm in 1972, the first Black woman to seek the nomination from a major party, and Reverend Jesse Jackson who ran in both 1984 and 1988 on a platform of building a multi-class, multi-racial Rainbow Coalition. What was significant about President Obama’s candidacy was not only the fact that he was the first Black man to be nominated by a major party, but also the fact that he won.
Obama was born in 1961 to a white mother from Kansas and a Black father from Kenya. He was raised mostly by his mother in Hawaii, before they moved to Indonesia when he was six years old. After high school, Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years before transferring to Columbia University where he graduated with a major in political science. He then worked as a community organizer in Chicago, before attending Harvard Law School in 1988 and becoming the first African-American President of the Harvard Law Review. In 1992, he married Michelle Robinson, a lawyer and Harvard Law graduate.
In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate, and in 2004 he was elected to be one of Illinois’s U.S senators. He was the first Black man to be nominated by a major party and win the Presidency. By 2007 and 2008, America had a lot going on. The country was involved in increasingly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Americans were facing the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression. As a result, people were losing their jobs, homes, and retirement savings at extraordinary rates. Black Americans, as has been the case throughout much of American history, were disproportionately hurt by all of the mortgage foreclosures and job losses. It is estimated that black people in the U.S. lost between 71 and 122 billion dollars in housing assets alone.
Barack Obama’s campaign focused on these issues. He promised to end the war in Iraq and save the American middle class, as well as to put an end to partisan, racial, and economic divides and to unite the country. This resonated with people who felt worn out by the financial disaster and frustrated by a political system that seemed like it could never get anything done. His campaign was particularly energizing to young people who were drawn to Obama’s theory of change and saw him as someone who represented a new, more diverse, and more progressive direction for America. After a long and hard-fought campaign against Arizona Senator John McCain, Barack Obama became the first African-American president of the United States in 2009.
In the early days of his presidency, Obama got to work attempting to fulfill many of his campaign promises. He supported reforms to the financial system like the Dodd-Frank and Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, outlawed the torture of prisoners who were detained during the war on terror, removed some of the restrictions on federal funding for stem cell research, ended the ban on federal grants for international groups providing abortion services and counseling, and named Sonia ior to the Supreme Court, making her the first Supreme Court justice of Hispanic dissent.
After evaluating the consequences of the Great Recession of 2008, he pushed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through Congress. Hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus was designed to shore up the economy in the midst of financial crisis. Tax incentives and benefits designed to help people who were recovering from financial crisis were an essential part of the bill. It did pass, but it passed with only partisan support; no Republicans supported the legislation in the House, and only three moderate Republicans voted for it in the Senate, which was indicative of the growing partisanship that would become a major factor in Obama’s presidency.
In the midst of all this, President Barack Obama’s approval rating was at 62 percent in the first hundred days of his term. He also made huge strides in the area of health care, after a long and polarized political battle. Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, a two-part law containing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act. The ACA would come to be known by many as “Obamacare”. Among other things, the legislation sought to improve access to medical coverage for everyone in the United States, keep insurance companies from raising premiums for individuals with pre-existing conditions, and to allow people to stay on their parents insurance up to age 26. enix Arizona’s criminal justice system which had been criticized for its racial profiling
Barack Obama faced racism and prejudice throughout his presidency, even though he was the first black president. For example, some members of the Republican party and conservative media outlets questioned his U.S. citizenship, forcing him to show his birth certificate to prove he was American, which scholars referred to as being explicitly racist. Additionally, political cartoons portrayed his wife Michelle using caricatures and stereotypes.
Congressional leaders publicly disrespected Obama, famously when Representative Joe Wilson yelled “you lie” in the middle of a speech Obama was making to a joint session of Congress. The rise of the Tea Party, an extremely conservative offshoot of the Republican Party, also ginned up opposition to his presidency through large public rallies which sometimes included racial slurs.
Obama was also criticized for his handling of issues of race. For example, in 2009 Henry Louis Gates Jr, a professor at Harvard University, was arrested for disorderly conduct after he tried to enter his own home and was mistaken for a thief. Gates argued that this was an incident of racial profiling. During a press conference where he discussed the incident, Obama said, “I don’t know not having been there and not seeing all the facts what role race played in that but I think it’s fair to say number one any of us would be pretty angry number two that the Cambridge Police acted stupidly in arresting someone when there was already proof that they were in their own home and number three what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately and that’s just a fact.” Obama received pushback from the Cambridge Police and conservative media pundits called Obama racist for suggesting that the police officer’s actions may have been motivated by race.
The death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 is also considered by many to be the start of the Black Lives Matter movement. Obama gave a speech addressing the issue and his pain as a black man over it, saying, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” Because of this comment, he was accused by some conservatives of dividing the country.
Obama worked hard to make his political and policy agenda one that Americans saw as universal. Still, he and his administration did work to address issues that disproportionately impacted the black community, such as reforming Phoenix, Arizona’s criminal justice system which had been criticized for its racial profiling.