Feb 10 2010
The Political Spectrum (Pt. 1) by Isaac Johnson
I’m an Illinoisan. Right now, the election for the next governor of Illinois is in progress and if you’ve been following the news over the past year and a half, you should be familiar with our predicament and should understand why this is a critical election. Still, having the right to vote, the right to bring light to issues affecting our own agenda, is a blessing. As I sit here thinking about the history of it all, the thing that interests me the most is our journey as a people. They were the best of times and they were the worst of times, but through it all, we’ve persevered. But…are we yet free?
Over the years, our position on the political landscape has been a conundrum, to say the least. That is partly because our needs and the answers to those needs have shifted with the times. We’ve been denied our voting rights, denied equal opportunity, denied respectable positions in society, the list of transgressions goes on. For each of those situations, there had to be a champion: someone who would take up our cause before the people and represent us. While those champions were oft maligned, they were still our champions. Champions such as Martin Luther King, Jr. offered peaceable resistance to get his point across, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (that’s Malcolm X) offered that we ought to “stop singing and start swinging” and that we had the power within us to make change, and Medgar Evers fought for the right to receive higher education among other things. These champions came at a time when our political affiliations began to shift overwhelmingly to the left side of the isle.
Beginning with the Emancipation Proclamation, former slaves came to identify primarily with the Republican Party, in honor of our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, who was also a Republican. While there continues to be great debate as to the intentions of Abraham Lincoln and his proposed Emancipation Proclamation (was it to free the slaves or save the Union?), one can’t deny the outcome. And it is also hard to deny the tendency for people to identify with those that they perceive to be sympathetic to their positions. This is why landmark programs such as FDR’s “New Deal” were viewed by many poor folks as a nod to the common man and in many ways, it was. In particular, this deal ultimately enabled African-Americans to receive aid and public housing, things that had been denied them previously. It was at this time that the shift to the Democratic Party began to take shape. The movement was strengthened further upon John F. Kennedy’s campaign for POTUS during the early 60′s and ultimately, the Republican Party began to concede the black vote to the Democrats.
I was recently asked by a reader of this site whether or not I believe that we are free. When I analyze that question, I have to say no, a majority of us are indeed not free. We’ll explore what I mean in part 2 of this series.
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