Are We Overlooking The Black Power Behind Obama? : NPR: A year ago this week, Barack Obama stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to take the presidential oath of office.
That moment was described throughout the media as the climax of a journey that began 46 years earlier, at the other end of the National Mall, when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his 'I Have a Dream' speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
But Peniel Joseph, a historian at Tufts University, says not enough attention has been paid to the other main line of succession in African-American leadership — the one that leads from Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and the black power movement.
'The connection between black power and Barack Obama doesn't fit a neat and simplistic national narrative about the success and evolution of the civil rights struggle,' Joseph tells NPR's Guy Raz.
