My father, historian David Nasaw, has a theory that arch-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas paved the way for Obama to run for president. Thomas, an appointee of the first President Bush, showed conservatives that, all else being equal, merely being black needn't disqualify an intelligent, highly educated man from achieving high station.
The seminal moment for my father was when Strom Thurmond, then a South Carolina senator and once a vicious segregationist, led Thomas and Thomas' white wife into a senate confirmation hearing.
In TheRoot.Com, Cleveland Plain Dealer write Sam Fulwood III, a lecturer at Case Western Reserve University, expands.
Fulwood credits Thomas with exploding the stereotype that blacks are dumb, uneducated -- and Democrat and liberal.
Whether you like it--or him--Clarence Thomas deserves credit--or blame--for reshaping popular notions of what it means to be black and American. And, win or lose in November, Obama is already an historic beneficiary.
As I interpret it, Fulwood argues that Thomas created political space for a moderate, non-threatening (to whites) black Democrat like Obama by showing America that a black political figure needn't be a "self-serving [preacher] in the clutches of left-leaning Democrats."
