Elmer Smith: A journey of awakening

I BECAME a civilian again in 1968. It should have been a breeze.

I had never left the United States in my three-year Army hitch. But the transition was trickier than I had imagined.

Because by 1968, I had outgrown almost every attitude I had held in the early '60s.

I was colored when I left home for Fort Jackson, S.C., in 1965. I had become a black man by 1968.

Seemed like everybody I knew had stopped believing that good would triumph over evil. We weren't even sure which was which.

It was the year that the murder of Bobby Kennedy closed Camelot. Whatever hope we had invested in the Kennedy boys would never pay dividends now.

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.

The black turnout was an impressive 66.8 percent. When all the votes are finally counted, the Joint Center estimates, it will probably be the first time black-voter turnout exceeded the percentage of white-voter turnout.

But we saw an even more dramatic turnaround in the Latino vote. President Bush won the Latino vote in Florida by 15 points in 2004. Obama won the Latino vote by 12 points. That 27-point swing was a key factor in his win in Florida.

What does it all mean? It probably means a lot more for America in general than it does for black Americans specifically. Obama will serve with a Congress that is more Democratic but has fewer black members than the one he served in.

The civil-rights cause has rarely been championed from the oval office. It won't be now.

Those black people who stood in long lines to vote for him never expected Obama to become their civil-rights leader. He never promised that.

So, Obama's election did not usher in the "post-racial" era in America. We've got a ways to go before we can call race a nonfactor in American life.

But we've come such a long way since 1968.

That was the year that Martin died in April and Bobby Kennedy died in June. I voted for Richard Nixon in November and got married four months later.

Forty years passed. My granddaughter voted for Barack Obama, and 1968 seemed like so, so long ago. *

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith