Martin Luther King & Barack Obama's Ancestors
Rosa Parks, John Lewis, James Lawson, Fannie Lou Hamer, others named
Apr 3, 2009
Defining ancestorhood, not from the genealogical perspective but in the context of those whose works contributed to the end of racial segregation in America through Civil Rights Activities, Dr. Vincent Harding, a friend, confidant and speech writer of Dr. King Jr., said, the ancestors of Barack Obama and Martin Luther King Jr. are nameless and included children, women and men.
Dr. Harding was speaking on the topic Martin Luther King Jr. & Barack Obama’s Other Ancestors, at the University of Winnipeg in the Canadian province of Manitoba. He said a number of great persons played significant roles in the things Dr. Luther King Jr. did. “King Jr. was called into his role in Montgomery, Alabama,” he told the hundreds of people who had gathered to hear about the other ancestors of the two great men.
Other Ancestors of Obama and Civil Rights Activists
Dr. Harding, a Historian of the African-American experience and a Civil Rights Activist himself, identified Rosa Parks as one of the great people whose work prompted the success of Dr. King Jr. and Barack Obama, and can thus be called an ancestor of the two. Parks has been named by the US Congress as Mother of Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Harding recounted one of the milestone incidents of Park’s rights activism in 1955, when she refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order to give up her seat to a white passenger.
Another figure named as an ancestor of Obama and Dr. King Jr. was John Lewis, the 69-year-old member of the US House of Representatives. Lewis was once the Chairman of the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC), a group that according to Dr. Harding played a significant role in the anti-segregation movements.
Also identified as ancestors of the two great leaders were James Lawson, a leading theoretician and tactician of non-violence in the American Civil Rights Movements; Diane Nash, leader and Chairman of the Nashville Student Movement and founder of the SNCC; and Ed King, a native Mississippian who returned from the North to join the Civil Rights activities in Mississippi in the 1960s and worked as a Chaplain at Tougaloo College, a predominantly black school.
Andrew Goodman, 20-year-old white Jewish Anthropology student from New York; James Chaney, 21-year-old Black Mississippian and Michael Schwerner, 24-year-old White Jewish Social Worker from New York, who were all killed in the Mississippi Civil Rights Workers’ Murders in 1964, were also identified by Dr. Harding as ancestors of Martin Luther King and Barack Obama. The deaths of the three young student political activists is often described as epitomising the dangers involved in Civil Rights Activities at the time.
The distinguished speaker and scholar further told his enthusiastic audience that the work of Corretta Scott King (wife of Dr. King Jr.), Joan Robinson, Fannie Lou Hammer and Ella Baker among others, could not be overlooked as these women participated actively and significantly in the Mississippi Freedom Summer movement and as such, they should also be recognised as ancestors of Obama and Dr. King Jr.
Is Obama The Dream of Martin Luther?
"Is Obama the Dream?” This was the thought-provoking question asked at the function by Dr. Michael Baffoe, a Ghanaian Professor at the University of Manitoba. Dr. Harding could not however provide a yes or no answer. “I am still wrestling with this question. I don’t know if Obama understands, at the deepest level, Dr. King’s dream,” Dr. Harding said.
The renowned speaker and Civil Rights activist said that Dr. King Jr. was extremely concerned about what he described as 'the three evils' he wanted to see eliminated from American society. He named them as racial discrimination; materialism and the exploitation of the poor; and militarism. Dr. Harding emphasised that eliminating these things might in fact be the true fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream.
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