The Obama Generation: How Youth Trumped Race

The following article is adapted from "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama" by Gwen Ifill. Copyright 2009 by Gwen Ifill. Published by Doubleday, an imprint of The Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc.

It is now an article of faith that President-elect Barack Obama pulled off a huge political stunt last November. He won over white voters (more than the white Democratic nominee did in 2004). He won over Latino voters, and he won over women voters (Hillary hangover notwithstanding).

Almost no one notices that he had to win over black voters and leadership, too, and that it took some work. Many African-Americans were skeptical of the man with the funny name who didn't seem to be from anywhere. It actually took a victory in Iowa, one of the whitest states in the nation, for many black voters to believe the black candidate was viable.

Black leadership was another challenge. It fell to Andrew Young, the venerable civil-rights marcher, former Atlanta mayor and United Nations ambassador, to explain the skepticism of many leaders in the black community.

"I'd like Barack Obama to be president," Mr. Young said, to a burst of applause from a small hometown audience in 2007. But then he added: "In 2016." The applauders were caught up short. A few booed. At that point, Mr. Young was still supporting his old friend Hillary Clinton. Mr. Obama, he decided, wasn't even close to ready. "It's not a matter of being inexperienced," Mr. Young said in a matter-of-fact tone. "It's a matter of being young."

What Mr. Young exposed that night in Atlanta was a rift between black politicians born in the 1930s and 1940s and those born in the 1960s and 1970s. "I had a hard time believing the Obama phenomenon," he admitted a year later. The world view of the older politicians, many of them preachers like Mr. Young, was defined by limitation. They couldn't eat at lunch counters. They couldn't sit where they liked on buses or vote how and for whom they liked. They couldn't attend the schools they preferred or aspire to the jobs they believed they were qualified to hold. Every time one of those barriers fell, it was power seized, not given. They marched, they preached, and they protested.

Their children, however, walked freely down the streets where their parents marched. Their schools were integrated, and Ivy League colleges came looking for them. They didn't grow up with Jim Crow laws or lynching trials, and they lived in a world shaped by access instead of denial.

"The prior generation that they replaced defined their position, their mission, their program, in opposition to whites," said Christopher Edley Jr., a former Carter and Clinton administration official. "And in that sense, the new generation defined their position, their vision, their program in a way that is -- again that word we're looking for; it's not nonracial, it's not postracial -- supraracial."

This newly expansive view is what Obama tapped into, treating his elders with careful respect, but lavishing his attention on a generation that sees race, but considers it a complement rather than a constraint.

It was impossible to miss the generational divide playing itself out in the 2008 election. Young Obama voters were the leading edge in enthusiasm and engagement. In the general election, Mr. Obama improved on 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's performance with voters under 30 by 12%. (Sen. John McCain bested Mr. Obama only among voters age 65 and older.) "You had probably a little over 13 million new voters jumping into the process," Obama pollster Cornell Belcher told me. "And among those new voters, Barack Obama won close to 70% of them. Part of his strategy from the beginning was: change the face of the electorate."

Another reason Mr. Obama had some trouble convincing black voters is because it had seldom been done this way before. Most black elected officials would never have been elected to office if they had to rely on white voters. Instead, they benefited from a civil-rights movement that created power through artfully drawn black majority districts. Once inside the circle, officials elected from these districts -- especially in Congress -- acquired a power of incumbency that virtually guaranteed re-election, year after year after year. The white political power structure, happy with separate but equal, generally looked the other way to protect their own politically safe preserves.

Mr. Obama and other new generation politicians like him correctly saw the change coming. The most well-known black leaders had begun to age out. The big names -- Jesse Jackson Sr., Vernon Jordan and Colin Powell -- are in their sixties and seventies.

The Obama generation is, for the most part, in their thirties, forties, or at most fifties, with their own networks and ideas about the best way to seize power.

Even among those fighting for change, there is often resistance to the shape it takes. John Lewis, the Georgia congressman who was 23 years old when he stood next to Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington, switched from Mrs. Clinton to Mr. Obama during the primary season in part because he feared ending up on the wrong side of history. In a politician less admired, it would have been called a flip-flop, but with Mr. Lewis the shift seemed genuinely painful. The process, he told NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, was more difficult than getting his head bashed in as he crossed Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. The current shift, he said, has its echoes.

"I saw it in Atlanta with some of the old guard, towards some of the young people, you hear 'They haven't paid their dues,' 'It's not their time, they need to get in line,' " he told me. "I think some of the old-line black leaders during the '60s, the late '50s and the '60s, wanted us to stay in our places, not get out of line, that we were going too fast, that we were pushing too fast. And they didn't understand this new, young degree of militancy."

Here's one rough measure of how quickly the generational game changed. Midway through the election year, the NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights organization, elected for the first time a 35-year-old president who was neither a politician nor a preacher. The organization nearly split itself in two selecting Benjamin Jealous only after eight hours of contentious closed-door debate.

"Look at the average age of people who led," Mr. Jealous told me, citing civil-rights icons of years past. "I look at the fact that Malcolm and Martin were dead by 39 and Medgar was dead by 36. And they all had been involved in the struggle for over a decade at the leadership level by the time they died." (Mr. Evers died at 37, but Mr. Jealous's point still holds.) Electing a black president, Mr. Jealous said, is an "exciting, traumatic, dramatic turning point in the struggle -- but it won't be the end. We'll still have many, many problems."

All around the country entrenched and emerging politicians have spent the better part of the last decade trying to master the feat Mr. Obama pulled off this year. The successful ones have managed to cross racial lines without alienating their base -- a huge break from the way their elders won office. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. could only have been elected in Harlem. Maxine Waters has South Central Los Angeles to thank for her electoral invincibility. This latest generation of black politicians and black political thinkers say they want more.

"We look different, we sound different, and what's so striking about the way in which the old guard responds to us is that they don't know what to do with us," said Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr. "And what's so striking to me as well is, we don't quite know what to do with ourselves either."

With few exceptions, most younger black politicians around the country embraced Mr. Obama immediately as a kindred spirit. For the civil-rights icons, it was more complicated. Oakland, California Mayor Ron Dellums, 72, chose to support Mrs. Clinton over Mr. Obama, but even he acknowledged the shifting winds. Black leaders, he said, have got to stop treating change as a threat. "You have to update your analysis, update the nature of your politics," he says. "You can't be 1958, you can't be 1968, you have to be 2008, but you build on those realities."

Meanwhile, civil-rights luminaries like Roger Wilkins, a 76-year-old historian, journalist and veteran activists saw Mr. Obama's rise as a natural evolution. "I love this transition," he said, "because my generation has done its work. Whatever one thinks of the result of that work, it was consequential work, and it did help change the nation."

"But now we're old," he continued, "and there are people whose path we made possible who see the country very, very differently than we did."