Harry C. Boyte: Civil rights history informs 'We are the ones'

Obama's use of the phrase is inclusive, not narcissistic.

By HARRY C. BOYTE

Last update: February 25, 2008 - 11:17 PM

The phrase that Barack Obama has used in several speeches, "we are the ones we've been waiting for," has been widely misattributed. Maureen Dowd in her New York Times column credited its origins to a "New Age-y speech" by Maria Shriver, who supposedly got it from Hopi Indians. Others have missed the mark on the meaning of the phrase. Thus, Joe Klein, writing in Time magazine, derided the thought that the campaign is about anything but Obama: "The Obama campaign is all too often about how wonderful the Obama campaign is."

In fact, the phrase comes from a song of the Southern civil rights movement. And the way it is resonating says a good deal about the public mood today.

I often heard "We are the ones" when I worked as a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the group headed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. I saw the power of ordinary people becoming agents of change, giving the song its meaning. Dorothy Cotton composed it to make the point, "We are the ones we've been waiting for," inspired by a line from June Jordan's "Poem to South African Women," commemorating a march against apartheid. People sang it across the American South.

Cotton directed the SCLC's Citizenship Education Program. Staff members like me organized "citizenship schools," training people in skills of collective action such as how to chair a meeting, how to research an issue, and how to negotiate with people of other views and interests. These training sessions eventually fed into the community organizing movement that shaped Obama as a young organizer in Chicago.

A call for citizen agency is the secret of Obama's appeal. "I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to make change in Washington. ... I'm asking you to believe in yours," says his website, backed up by "Yes we can," his campaign slogan.

Commentators who miss this also often mischaracterize the civil rights movement itself. A case in point was the debate in New Hampshire about which great leader, King or Lyndon Johnson, should get credit for civil rights achievements.

As King often acknowledged, the power of the civil rights movement came not mainly from great leaders but rather from ordinary men and women in communities who saw themselves as changing an entire way of life. As King put it in his classic "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," "One day the South will recognize its real heroes [such as] oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a 72-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: 'My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.'"

Obama's call for citizens to become agents of change is resonating with audiences in the Deep South who remember the civil rights movement. It also has appeal in parts of the country with histories of strong civic action.

In Minnesota, political leaders across the spectrum have championed civic action, from Hubert Humphrey and the late Sen. Paul Wellstone to Al Quie, Republican governor in the 1980s.

As soon as Obama's message gained sufficient volume to be heard, it resonated in Minnesota like a deep note vibrating in a bass drum. The Humphrey Institute-Minnesota Public Radio poll found Hillary Clinton to be ahead of Obama by seven percentage points Jan. 20-27. But on Feb. 5, when Minnesota Democrats held their caucuses, Obama won 67 percent to Clinton's 32 percent -- an astonishing change.

Where citizen agency goes from here remains to be seen. Presidential candidates, including Barack Obama, have yet to give much policy flesh to how citizens can work in partnership with government on issues such as global warming, health care or school reform. But something is stirring in this election larger than charisma or expert plans to fix the nation's problems. Citizens are remembering "we are the ones," and returning to public life.

Harry C. Boyte is a senior fellow at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship.

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