The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. forced foot soldiers in the civil-rights movement to come to grips with the fact that they could no longer expect America to adjust its racial attitudes just because they had shown her the error of her ways.
I watched Tommie Smith and John Carlos mount a silent protest at the Olympic games and felt proud and powerful. I envisioned a time when the country I had been willing to fight for saw me as I saw myself.
Forty years later, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States with a vote total that included a higher share (43 percent) of the white vote than the last two white Democratic candidates had won.
What does it say about how far we've come in the 40 years since Dr. King's assassination? A closer look at the preliminary returns by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Activities offers some fascinating insights.
Obama won North Carolina and Virginia, two states from the old Confederacy. But he drew a smaller percentage of the white vote in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana than John Kerry did in 2004.
"Given the political environment of 2008," the report concludes, "those declines can only be attributed to race."
But outside of the Deep South, Obama received more of the white vote than any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson, including a majority of the white vote in 16 states and in the District of Columbia.
The power and pride that black people felt in 1968 were important factors in Obama's election. But he couldn't have done it without a multiracial coalition.
Obama got 95 percent of the black vote. But black voters gave 94 percent of their vote to LBJ. Blacks contributed 23.5 percent of Obama's vote total. But we represented 22.1 percent of Kerry's.
