It started with a train ride. Barack Obama rode to Washington for his presidential inauguration on a whistle-stop tour. "To the children who hear the whistle of the train and dream of a better life - that's who we're fighting for," Obama said along the tour, which was compared to the train ride taken by Abraham Lincoln from Springfield, Ill., to Washington in February 1861, en route to his first inauguration. The comparisons between Obama and Lincoln abound, describing the arc between the abolition of slavery in the United States and the election of the first African American president.
The train holds a deeper symbolism, though, that undergirds Obama's historic ascension to the White House, harking back to the civil rights struggle, reflecting the unprecedented grassroots activism that formed the core of the Obama campaign and laying out where the nation under the Obama administration might go.
A. Philip Randolph was a legendary labor organizer and civil rights leader. He organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the men who tended to the overnight guests on the sleeper cars that Pullman built. While the porter positions were better-paying than many jobs available to African Americans at the time, there were still injustices and indignities. The common practice, for example, was to call the porters "George," regardless of their real name, after the owner of the company, George Pullman. Thousands of porters sought improvements through collective bargaining. (Ironically, after Pullman's death in 1897, the Pullman Co. was run by Abe Lincoln's only surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, until the mid-1920s.) Randolph's organizing struggle took 12 years, starting in 1925 and going through the economic collapse of 1929 and into the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration.
Harry Belafonte recalled in an interview with Tavis Smiley recently a story he was told by Eleanor Roosevelt. She related a public event when her husband, FDR, introduced Randolph and asked him, Belafonte recalled, "what he thought of the nation, what he thought of the plight of the Negro people and what did he think ... where the nation was headed." Continuing the story, Belafonte recounted what FDR replied upon hearingRandolph's remarks: "You know, Mr. Randolph, I've heard everything you've said tonight, and I couldn't agree with you more. I agree with everything that you've said, including my capacity to be able to right many of these
