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"It was surprising, that is, until a few minutes into the film when Obama in NC took a sweeping U-turn into the past—setting the campaign aside to deal with first things first. As Michaels delights in saying, "You're invited to a campaign film and suddenly history breaks out."
It's the history of racism in North Carolina and the heroic struggles against it since Reconstruction, powerfully depicted and climaxing—but not for almost two hours—with Obama's election. A central struggle in the mid-20th century is whether Raleigh's schools would be integrated or segregated. In North Carolina, the South's "education state" (that was Martin Luther King's term, according to his friend the Rev. Dr. David Forbes, then a student at Shaw University), nothing could be more important to the future—or more relevant to today.
At the film's end, the GSIW audience stood clapping, cheering and hearing a clear message about their own cause.
"The message is, our history matters," said Lynn Edmonds, a pro-diversity activist. "When you understand the history, the struggles to bring our citizens to a common and moral ground," said Yevonne Brannon, the coalition's leader, "it makes it clear why it's important to fight this fight in Wake County, and why winning it is an historical imperative."
Michaels was only dimly aware of North Carolina's history when he was covering Obama. That's because, though it may seem that he was born reporting the news here, he grew up and began his working career in Brooklyn, N.Y. Like many of us, he knew something about the 1898 Wilmington Riots, the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins, the Ku Klux Klan. What he didn't know, but learned after he followed some friends' advice to add a bit of "historical context" to what was intended to be a campaign film, is how these events and others bled into a racist stain as deep as any Southern state's, one North Carolina has covered over but will not soon expunge.
Set against this North Carolina history, Obama's victories here—in the Democratic primary over Hillary Clinton and then, by an eyelash, over Republican John McCain in November 2008—become both more incredible than you may have thought (especially if you're white) and less a breakthrough than a milestone on the tortuous trail of black history, in which every step forward was followed by white backlash.
-snip-
"Which only proves," Michaels says, "what history teaches, that all things are cyclical."
"Seeing a black family in the White House is something that some people simply cannot take," Michaels says. "What was 1898 about in Wilmington? 'We don't want to be under Negro rule.' Well, what is the Tea Party about in 2010? 'We don't want to be under Negro rule.'"
The backlash is present in the Wake schools battle too, he says, where the issue boils down today—as it did in 1956—to: "We have schools for you. We have schools for us."
In that vein, Obama in NC is prescient in dramatizing the battle over school integration in Raleigh a half-century ago—a struggle that lasted well into the 1970s—as pivotal in the state's progress, pitting liberal educators, clergy and the NAACP against conservatives like the onetime Raleigh broadcaster, and later senator, Jesse Helms.
There's a line in the film spoken in Raleigh in 1988 by Coretta Scott King, Dr. King's widow. Mrs. King was here because North Carolina had finally adopted MLK's birthday as a state holiday, surmounting the backlash against integration fomented by, among others, Sen. Helms.
North Carolina's action showed, Mrs. King said with a wry smile, "that we are not helpless, and the situation is not hopeless."'
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