Five years ago I was having dinner with a group of students in a bar in Carbondale, Illinois. As we left I saw five men seated at a back table. Waiting for them as they got up to leave, I stopped the tall and handsome man. It was Barack Obama, then campaigning for the Democratic nomination for Senator from Illinois. He stooped and listened patiently as I told him that Julian Bond was a good friend of mine, that I had photographed the civil rights movement, and that my daughter, Gabrielle, was an activist in Chicago, and my son in law, Dr. Paul Sereno, was also on the University of Chicago faculty where Obama had taught constitutional law.

Obama lives in Hyde Park, Chicago, the neighborhood I left to join SNCC 46 years ago. When he began his run for the Presidency of the United States, I sent him my civil rights book and wrote across the opening page, “The hopes and dreams of untold thousands rest with you”. I wanted to write “millions”.

When I was nineteen and a college student in Chicago, the first reports of the American civil rights movement were reaching me. I read that Martin Luther King was in jail in Georgia. I had no car and no idea of how to get there. In 1962, in my third year as a history student at the University of Chicago, I talked with a fellow student, a white Jewish woman who had been arrested in a demonstration in the South. It was my first contact with the black rebellion that was slowly growing in the southern states. That year I was twenty years old. Segregation, or aparthied, was the law of the land in thirteen American states. With contact information from my fellow student, I hitchhiked south, first to southern Illinois where I met John Lewis, who is now a congressmen and still one of my oldest friends.

Within a week I had reached the deep south in Georgia, was thrown into jail, and looked through the bars across to the Negro section of the jail to watch Martin Luther King being served a special lunch of chicken on a red and white checkered tablecloth and being examined by a doctor. I had managed to reach the southern civil rights movement about one year before it was recognized as a major story by the press. The word “media” was not used in 1962.

Now I am sixty -six and there are two things I like to tell people of my life. One is that I was in jail with Martin Luther King, the other is that I spent four days alone with Muhammad Ali in 1973 just before the second Jerry Quarry fight. Ali is like King, an American great. In 1968 Ali did something that is almost unheard of in our society. He put principles before money and refused to fight in Vietnam. “No Vietcong ever called me Nigger” is as good a line as many that Jefferson wrote, and Muhammad Ali did not go to college.

Any one that experienced segregation in the South, cannot help but jump when he sees a black family being served in a white restaurant in Mississippi. I will never get used to it. I saw too many people thrown through windows, knocked down, beaten up and arrested over and over to ever take this simple event for granted. Nor will I ever feel safe driving down a dark southern highway at night, all alone, because I know of young people that were in the Movement and were murdered as they drove down those roads at night.

As I write this Obama is about to become the 44th President of the United States. The office created for George Washington, a holder of hundreds of African slaves. An office elevated by Abraham Lincoln who wrote very clearly that the black person would never be equal to the white person, and thought sending the slaves back to Africa was the best way to deal with the problem. Of course it was James Baldwin who pointed out that “the problem” was something white people had, not blacks.

Obama’s campaign, in fact the whole phenomenon of his candidacy, is a page torn out of the Southern Civil Rights Movement and is the direct result of the events that occurred in the deep south forty six years ago. The grass roots uprising that I joined in 1962 was called the movement, with a small “m” and within two years I published a book called The Movement, with a capital M. That is what media people do. They take reality and sell it to the public. The entire idea of the leader that does not lead is straight from the life of Bob Moses, the NYC math teacher that led the rebellion in Mississippi and lead the successful fight to secure the right for blacks to vote in that state and across the South. When Hillary stupidly said that President Johnson secured the right to vote by signing the voting rights act in 1967, she insulted a lot of people. The people that won the right to vote in the South were the young people, mostly black, that put their lives on the line and created the pressure that made the voting rights act possible. When the Klan gathered in Mississippi to murder three voter registration workers, one of them was a black boy from Mississippi and the other two were Jewish boys from New York City. So the Obama candidacy has taken the tactics of the Movement, of grass roots organizing, of the “leader that does not lead” and used it successfully in a run for the Presidency.

Just participating in the black rebellion in the South in the early 1960’s was a victory. You didn’t have to win every battle because the biggest battle was overcoming your and your family’s fear to join the movement. Obama’s candidacy is in itself a huge victory. It shows that the media’s constant refrain that Americans all hate each other and that we are a deeply racist society is simply not true.

As the author of many books of journalism and films using pictures and words, I have devoted my life to creating an honest picture of America, almost always in direct opposition to the false world that seems to so naturally come from the Media. Can you change society? Can you change Americans? Can you even see or recognize change? If you live long enough and get old enough, you can see change. You can see it now. The real people that created this wonderful moment in American and world history aren’t the thousands of young people that have worked so hard organizing Obama’s victories. The people that created this moment are now in their sixties and older and worked for this moment when they were young and some that worked for it their whole lives.

I am not much for TV pundits, but one of them, on CNBC, commenting on Obama’s startling victory in Iowa, said something that made me jump and deserves repeating. He talked of the myriad problems of America and how the world and many people have come to view the United States. “Its almost as if he were sent by God,” he said. I agree.

Danny Lyon, April 27, 2008