BREAKTHROUGH, THE(ISBN=9780767928908) 英文原版 网盘下载 pdf 免费 2025 在线 epub 电子版

　　In The Breakthrough, veteran journalist Gwen Ifill

surveys the American political landscape, shedding new light on the

impact of Barack Obama’s stunning presidential victory and

introducing the emerging young African American politicians forging

a bold new path to political power.

Ifill argues that the Black political structure formed during the

Civil Rights movement is giving way to a generation of men and

women who are the direct beneficiaries of the struggles of the

1960s. She offers incisive, detailed profiles of such prominent

leaders as Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Massachusetts Governor Deval

Patrick, and U.S. Congressman Artur Davis of Alabama (all

interviewed for this book), and also covers numerous up-and-coming

figures from across the nation. Drawing on exclusive interviews

with power brokers such as President Obama, former Secretary of

State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, his

son Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., and many others, as well as her

own razor-sharp observations and analysis of such issues as

generational conflict, the race/ gender clash, and the "black

enough" conundrum, Ifill shows why this is a pivotal moment in

American history.

The Breakthrough is a remarkable look at contemporary

politics and an essential foundation for understanding the future

of American democracy in the age of Obama.

Introduction

1. BREAKING THROUGH

2 . THE GENERATIONAL DIVIDE

3 . BARACK OBAMA

4. THE RACE-GENDER CLASH

5 . ARTUR DAVIS

6 . LEGACY POLITICS

7 . CORY BOOKER

8. THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY

9. DEVAL PATRICK

10. THE NEXT WAVE

CONCLUSION

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

　　GWEN IFILL is moderator and managing editor of Washington

Week and senior correspondent of The NewsHour with Jim

Lehrer. Before coming to PBS, she was chief congressional and

political correspondent for NBC News, and had been a reporter for

the New York Times, the Washington Post, the

Baltimore Sun, and Boston Herald American. She lives

in Washington, D.C.

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　　INTRODUCTION

　　I learned how to cover race riots by telephone. They didn't pay

me enough at my first newspaper job to venture onto the grounds of

South Boston High School when bricks were being thrown. Instead, I

would telephone the headmaster and ask him to relay to me the

number of broken chairs in the cafeteria each day. A white

colleague dispatched to the scene would fill in the details for

me.

　　I've spent 30 years in journalism since then chronicling stories

like that – places where truth and consequences collide, rub up

against each other, and shift history's course. None of that

prepared me for 2008 and the astonishing rise of Barack

Obama.

　　It is true that he accomplished what no black man had before, but

it went farther than that. Simply as an exercise in efficient

politics, Obama '08 rewrote the textbook. His accomplishment was

historic and one that transformed how race and politics intersect

in our society. Obama is the leading edge of this change, but his

success is merely the ripple in a pond that grows deeper every

day.

　　"When people do something that they've never done before, I think

that makes it easier to do it a second time," David Axelrod, the

Obama campaign's chief strategist, told me just days after Obama

won. "So when people vote for an African American candidate, I

think itmakes it easier for the next African American

candidate."

　　The next African American candidates – and a fair share of those

already in office, subscribe to a formula driven as much by

demographics as destiny. When population shifts – brought about by

fair housing laws, affirmative action and landmark school

desegregation rulings – political power is challenged as well. It

happened in Boston, New York, Chicago and every other big city

reshaped by an influx of European immigration. It is happening

again now in Miami and Los Angeles, in suburban Virginia and in

rural North Carolina, where the political calculus is being

reshaped by Latino immigrants. With African Americans, freighted

with the legacy of slavery and the pushback from whites who refuse

to feel guilty for the sins of their ancestors, the shift has been

more scattered and sporadic – yet no less profound.

　　Boston was awash in the sort racial drama that foreshadows

dramatic change when I began my journalism career at the Boston

Herald American in 1977.

　　While I was attending Simmons College, the Federal courts

demanded that the city's very political school committee fix the

city's racially unbalanced education system.

　　The solution, imposed by U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur

Garrity in 1974, seemed pretty straightforward. Send white children

to black neighborhoods and black children to white neighborhoods.

It came to be known as forced busing.

　　The idea was to impose balance where it no longer existed. The

optimistic reasoning was that the resources -- teachers, textbooks,

shared experience -- would follow. But history now shows us busing

– moving 20,000 students to and fro in search of quality education

was, in fact, a far more radical notion than originally envisioned.

It struck at the heart of neighborhood and racial identity in

cities all over the nation, most memorably so in Irish South Boston

and black Roxbury.

　　White residents of insular neighborhoods railed – sometimes

violently – against the incursion into their neighborhood schools.

Black residents in Roxbury railed right back.

　　As I walked to my college classes in Boston's Fenway neighborhood

that fall, I saw the result with my own eyes -- Boston's finest in

riot gear stepping in to prevent clashes at English High School. It

was a scene that played out again and again all over the city, all

over the country.

　　"The white kids don't like black kids and black kids don't like

white kids," one white student said after one of the melees I

covered by phone. "All of it is prejudice. All I know is that no

one's getting any education."

　　"It's a perfect example that forced desegregation and forced

busing does not work," Elvira Pixie Palladino, an anti-busing

member of the school committee told me at the time.

　　White students fled the city schools during those years, so many

that the majority-white city's education system became majority

black within a decade. By 2000, only a quarter of the city's

children were white. Drastically fewer – under 14 percent – were

enrolled in the city's elementary schools.

　　It took some years, and a more sophisticated understanding of how

race and poverty intersect, for me to begin to understand that what

I saw in Boston was about more than just black and white kids not

liking each other. It was the beginning of a power shift that was

defined by, but not limited to, race.

　　I moved to Baltimore in 1981, where the tipping point I had

witnessed taking shape in Boston was a little farther along. When I

arrived, the city's leaders were still mostly white, but 56 percent

of the city's residents were already nonwhite, a number that grew

to 64 percent by 2000.

　　On the surface, Baltimore's political vibe was less charged than

Boston's, but the power shifts were no less significant. The city's

paternalistic mayor, William Donald Schaefer, had revived downtown

with a national aquarium and a Disney-like harbor development that

brought tourists in droves. Twin baseball and football stadiums

were poised to sprout on downtown's southern edge. Gleaming

condominiums and hotels replaced what had been rundown waterfront

docks. Schaefer was hailed in national magazines as an urban

savior. Howard Cosell told a Monday Night Football audience that

Schaefer was "the genius mayor."

　　But not far from the glittering downtown development most

convention visitors saw, the picture was more complicated. Crime

was climbing. The schools were sliding. And change was in the

offing.

　　Schaefer, an unmarried curmudgeon used to getting his own way,

was suspicious of change. And he was doubly suspicious of any call

for change that seemed rooted in racial claim. That meant that he

would also be suspicious of me, a black woman whose job it was to

ask him questions he did not like. As he growled and snapped at me

– and, honestly, at most other reporters too – I came to realize

what I was witnessing: the friction that is a necessary byproduct

of sandpaper change.

　　In 1983, Billy Murphy, a black judge and scion of a prominent

local family decided to use the sandpaper. Schaefer was still

immensely popular, but he was also aware that new minority

majorities had recently swept black mayors into office for the

first time in cities like Atlanta, and that the barrier was about

to fall that year in Philadelphia as well.

　　In the end, Murphy turned out to be a pretty inadequate

Democratic primary candidate, disorganized and unfocused. Even

though then-Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, Martin Luther King 3rd and

comedian and activist Dick Gregory came to town to campaign for

him, Schaefer still managed to snare fully half of the black vote,

in a majority black city.

　　Even in defeat though, Murphy's challenge was enough to open some

eyes to the possibility that the "mayor for life," as Schaefer had

been dubbed, might be displaced. Perhaps it was time for a

candidate who looked like most of the people who lived in the city.

Schaefer hated this line of reasoning, openly detested Murphy and

refused to speak his name aloud. Still, he saw the handwriting on

the wall.

　　Four years later, Baltimore did get its black mayor when, after

16 years in charge, Schaefer was elected governor and selected a

successor to fill his unexpired term. Clarence "Du" Burns, the

affable City Council president who rose to that position from

humble beginnings as a locker room attendant, was only too happy to

claim a job he may never have been able to win outright. "I got

standing ovations at churches," Burns marveled years later. "I

hadn't done anything for them, but I was the first black mayor,

y'understand?"

　　Burns, who learned the ways of city politics behind every closed

door at City Hall, ended up spending 17 years there, but only 11

months as mayor. The first time he ran for the job outright, Burns

was defeated by a younger, politically unannointed Yale and

Harvard-educated attorney, a black man with the unlikely name of

Kurt Schmoke. Schmoke, had abandoned a prestigious post in the

Carter White House to return home to Baltimore. "I thought why did

he give up working in the White House?" said his former White House

colleague Christopher Edley Jr. "What's going on? And he said, I'm

going to indict a few bad guys, make some connections in the

corporate world and run for office."

　　That is exactly what Schmoke did, first winning election as

state's attorney before making the run for City Hall. Even though

he was up against the well-oiled Schaefer machine, Schmoke defeated

Burns by 5,000 votes by capturing the imagination of Baltimore

voters – black and white – in a way neither Murphy nor Burns, with

their old-school ties and backroom ways, could not.

　　"I was kind of the beneficiary in a way of a change sparked by

the latter end of civil rights movement," said Schmoke, who is now

the dean of the Howard University School of Law, which produced

Thurgood Marshall, L. Douglas Wilder and Vernon Jordan. "The voting

rights act, which opened up so many opportunities throughout the

country, started to hit its stride by 1980, and people built on

that."

　　That trend was also in evidence about 40 minutes down the

interstate highway in Prince George's County, Maryland. By 1984, I

had taken my unintentional road trip through sandpaper politics to

this Washington suburb, where --- between 1980 and 1990 – the

African American population spurted from 37 to 50 percent. During

that same period, nearly 77,000 whites moved elsewhere – a loss of

nearly 20 percent of the county's white population.

　　The county's power structure was in the midst of a corresponding

shift from mostly white to mostly black when I was covering it for

the Washington Post. As occurred with S...

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媒体评论

　　"a strongly reported book, with some broad conclusions drawn

from scores of interviews and peppered with interesting, revealing

profiles. . . . Yet this is more than a book of connected profiles

and narratives. Ifill bores at varying depths into race, class,

gender and generational change."

　　"-Los Angeles Times"

书籍介绍

In The Breakthrough , veteran journalist Gwen Ifill surveys the American political landscape, shedding new light on the impact of Barack Obama’s stunning presidential victory and introducing the emerging young African American politicians forging a bold new path to political power.

Ifill argues that the Black political structure formed during the Civil Rights movement is giving way to a generation of men and women who are the direct beneficiaries of the struggles of the 1960s. She offers incisive, detailed profiles of such prominent leaders as Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and U.S. Congressman Artur Davis of Alabama (all interviewed for this book), and also covers numerous up-and-coming figures from across the nation. Drawing on exclusive interviews with power brokers such as President Obama, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, his son Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., and many others, as well as her own razor-sharp observations and analysis of such issues as generational conflict, the race/ gender clash, and the "black enough" conundrum, Ifill shows why this is a pivotal moment in American history.

The Breakthrough is a remarkable look at contemporary politics and an essential foundation for understanding the future of American democracy in the age of Obama.