"I want my country back, I want my dream back": Barack Obama and the appeal of postracial fictions: Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, and the Romantic Appeal of Postracial Fictions

On August 28, 2008, Illinois' junior senator Barack Obama became the first African American to be nominated as the presidential candidate of a major political party in the United States. That historic day coincided with the forty-fifth anniversary of the March on Washington, when Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Obama and his campaign team were quick to capitalize on this synchronicity. At the climax of the Democratic Convention at Invesco Field in Denver, the nominee was preceded onto the stage by two of King's children-the Reverend Bernice King and Martin Luther King III- and by veteran activist John Lewis, former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and long-serving congressman from Georgia who had shared the podium with King in 1963. Their presence offered personal and rhetorical witness to the continuity between Obama and King and the black struggles of the past. "Tonight," Lewis told millions of Americans, "we have gathered here in this magnificent stadium in Denver because we still have a dream. With the nomination of Senator Barack Obama⋯ we are making a down payment on the fulfillment of that dream."1. Copyright © 2011 by The University Press of Kentucky. All rights reserved.