Obama dit s'être inspiré de MLK et affirme que sans les luttes pour les droits civiques, il ne serait pas devenu Président. Il se garde cependant d'établir des contacts étroits avec la "vieille garde"... Plusieurs écouteront très attentivement son discours dimanche.
"But when it comes to many of the aging leaders who marched with King, the relationship is more complicated. Obama, for the most part, has kept the civil rights movement’s old guard at arm’s length. They, in turn, are wary, their sense that the election of the first black president represented the ultimate success of the movement now tinged with disappointment that Obama has not more aggressively confronted issues of economic inequality.
“Treat him as you would any other president — none in my lifetime has totally satisfied me,” said Julian Bond, the longtime activist and former chairman of the NAACP who once was a student of King’s at Morehouse College.
This ambivalence will be one of the undercurrents Sunday when Obama leads the tributes to King at the dedication of a memorial to the slain civil rights leader on the National Mall — a ceremony that was postponed from August because of Hurricane Irene — and at a private gathering of King family members and civil rights leaders that the president will host at the White House afterward.
With thousands of people expected for the dedication and the president scheduled to speak on King’s legacy, it will be Obama’s most public embrace of the movement his predecessors in the White House have celebrated but usually kept at a distance.
“I don’t really think any president has fully brought movement leaders into the inner circle, and to expect that Obama, as a black president, ought to be closer than others have been, I think, is not a fair expectation,” said Scott Sandage, a cultural historian at Carnegie Mellon University.
“Treat him as you would any other president — none in my lifetime has totally satisfied me,” said Julian Bond, the longtime activist and former chairman of the NAACP who once was a student of King’s at Morehouse College.
This ambivalence will be one of the undercurrents Sunday when Obama leads the tributes to King at the dedication of a memorial to the slain civil rights leader on the National Mall — a ceremony that was postponed from August because of Hurricane Irene — and at a private gathering of King family members and civil rights leaders that the president will host at the White House afterward.
With thousands of people expected for the dedication and the president scheduled to speak on King’s legacy, it will be Obama’s most public embrace of the movement his predecessors in the White House have celebrated but usually kept at a distance.
“I don’t really think any president has fully brought movement leaders into the inner circle, and to expect that Obama, as a black president, ought to be closer than others have been, I think, is not a fair expectation,” said Scott Sandage, a cultural historian at Carnegie Mellon University."
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/65936.html#ixzz1ammn6L4p
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