CAIRO: As I watched Barack Obama delivering his victory speech after winning the 44th Presidency of the United States of America, I did not only see a hip and charismatic American politician who struck the right cords with the American people. When I saw Barack Obama, I saw the civil rights movement with the new president-elect as its natural outcome.
When I saw Barack Obama, I thought of Martin Luther King’s dream and his historic speech about whites and blacks living peacefully together, which he gave in Washington DC in front of 250,000 Americans in 1963. When I saw Barack Obama, I thought of thousands of African-Americans and white supporters marching from Selma to Montgomery, demanding the right to vote. I saw hundreds of African-American citizens refusing to ride the buses in Montgomery in 1955 because an elderly African-American woman, called Rosa Parks, was arrested for refusing to abandon her bus seat to a white passenger, as were the rules in the south.
When I heard Barack Obama talk about a change that has come to America, I thought of the Freedom Riders, a group of African-Americans and some white students who ventured on interracial buses in the south – defying Jim Crow and segregation laws – being savagely beaten up by racists, having their skulls smashed, their teeth broken and their faces smeared with bloods. I thought of Malcolm X’s incessant struggle for African-Americans which ended with his death just like Martin Luther King, who was killed in 1968 Memphis where he was fighting for the rights of African-American garbage collectors.
I saw Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) activists attacking segregation in all its vicious forms in the north and south of America. I saw African-American students staging sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the south, refusing to abandon their seats until being served like white customers, even though they were hit, spat upon and terrorized by racist mobs.
When I saw Barack Obama, I thought of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome and Sam Cooke’s song “A Change is Gonna Come. I thought of civil rights heroes like John Lewis, Robert James, James Forman, Stokley Carmichael, James Farmer, James Bevel, Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy and many more who were subjected to unbearable psychological pressure and physical violence in their journey to demand African-American civil rights.
Barack Obama would not be here without the civil rights movement. A movement led by African-American pastors, students and ordinary citizens who refused to bear the humiliation of being treated as second-class citizens; of not being able to vote and getting a decent job, education, or even a meal because of the color of their skin. Just Google the name James Meredith, first African-American to attend the University of the Mississippi, a state bolstering with racism at the time, to learn about the terror he endured just because he believed that he had equal rights like any other white Mississippi student to get a university degree.
The list goes on and on and ends with Barack Obama. Although the political struggle for African-Americans is far from over. Anyone thinking that the African-American community has overcome all its problems would be mistaken. (Half of the prison inmates in American jails are African-Americans despite the fact that they make up only eight percent of the population.)
So when I see this just turn of events and how America has come a long way, I can’t help but draw parallels between CORE and SNCC and the Kefaya Movement and Shayfenkum. I can’t prevent myself from dreaming that one day Judges Hesham El-Bastawisy, Mahmoud Mekki and Mahmoud Hamza will also be remembered as national heroes. And I imagine even further that if Martin Luther King was an Egyptian, he would have invoked an “Egyptian Dream, based on equal opportunities and justice for everybody.
An “Egyptian Dream where there is no torture, no corruption, no social and no political injustice. And maybe this dream would not just remain a dream and find fulfillment like Martin Luther King’s dream that has partially became real today.
Sherif Abdel Samadis a PhD candidate at the Free University of Berlin, researching “Non-violence in the Civil Rights Movement in America.
