Black Americans on long road to political equality

By Matthew Bigg

ATLANTA (Reuters) - For black Americans, the road to political inclusion that has allowed Democratic candidate Barack Obama to make a serious bid for the White House has been long and difficult.

After the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery in 1863, a series of laws and amendments to the U.S. constitution allowed Hiram Revels to be elected to the senate in 1870 in Mississippi as the country's first African American congressman.

But only a small number of black Americans have entered the U.S. senate or become state governors since then and most of those who have found a slot on a presidential ticket had no chance of winning.

The most unlikely black American on a presidential ticket was Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, Douglass taught himself to read, illegal for blacks at the time, fought a slave master and was repeatedly whipped.

He escaped to New York in 1838, where he became a prominent lecturer, newspaper publisher and a spokesman for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights.

His autobiography became a bestseller and he advised President Abraham Lincoln during the civil war and delivered a stirring eulogy at Lincoln's funeral.

But when Victoria Woodhull ran for president for the Equal Rights Party in 1872 and named Douglass as her vice-presidential candidate, Douglass, who supported incumbent President Ulysses Grant, never acknowledged that he was on Woodhull's ticket and never campaigned on his own behalf.

"It was a publicity stunt to generate attention to some for the issues she believed in," said Eric Foner, a leading expert on the period.

NO VOTE

In the decades after the end of the civil war, two black Americans were elected to the U.S. Senate before a series of laws ushered in an era of disenfranchisement, segregation and lynchings, all of which stifled black political participation.

In 1932, 1936 and 1940, James Ford, a labor organizer, ran as the Communist Party's vice-presidential candidate. Though the party gained less than 1 percent of the vote in 1932, some blacks including prominent intellectuals were attracted to its commitment to end racial discrimination as part of the drive for equality for all oppressed workers.

Until that point, most Americans would have laughed off the idea of a black presidential bid as far-fetched.

But a change started when, in the teeth of violent opposition, the civil rights movement set winning the right for blacks to vote in the South as a goal. After landmark acts in 1964 and 1965, blacks were able to vote in large numbers.

Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the militant Black Power movement, ran for president in 1968 on a pro-civil rights, anti-Vietnam War platform. The same year, comedian and activist Dick Gregory ran for president for the Freedom and Peace Party, which had broken off from Cleaver's Peace and Freedom Party.

That year, Charlene Mitchell, another communist, became the first African American woman on a presidential ballot -- she ran in two states.