July 30th saw a morbid confluence of farewells to two notable African-American figures in our society. The day of the funeral of civil rights icon and Congressman John Lewis also brought news of the coronavirus-related death of millionaire businessman and 2012 presidential contender Herman Cain. In many ways, the two were quite different people. On the one hand, Rep. John Lewis represented the tremendous progress our nation has made in regards to civil rights from the era of Jim Crow and segregation in the 1960s to the election of America’s first Black president in 2008. His journey and legacy were more political, governmental, and socio-cultural in nature. As such, it is only natural that the Democratic Party would be the political home of this civil rights icon, as they emphasize political and cultural solutions to racial inequities. On the other hand, Herman Cain was a wealthy businessman best known for his work as an executive of Burger King and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza. For an African-American to achieve these heights of business itself is a testament to the drastic change our country has undergone in its treatment of Black Americans. Yet this legacy of Cain’s is not so political or governmental as was Lewis’s. Rather, it was economic in nature. From that perspective, it should also be unsurprising that Cain’s political fame was as a member and former presidential contender in the Republican Party, which places greater value on economic opportunity as a salve for societal ills.
As recently as 60 years ago, the cumulative achievements of the lives of John Lewis and Herman Cain would have been unthinkable. Yet history speaks for itself; Lewis and Cain served as transitional figures in their respective fields of politics and business from a former era of explicit racial oppression to these modern times of definite improvement but lingering imperfection. Of course, one might be forgiven if they were more aware of the tragic loss of John Lewis than they were of the passing of Herman Cain. The former’s death and funeral certainly received more national media attention than the passing of the latter. And perhaps this should not be surprising. Lewis was, in many respects, a giant of the civil rights movement, a movement that fundamentally altered the trajectory and shape of American society. Cain might have achieved such fame if his 2012 bid for president had been successful, but history will forever place Herman Cain amongst the myriad numbers of other presidential aspirants who didn’t quite make it. Despite this gulf between the stature of their legacies, I believe that the loss of these two significant men should cause us to reflect on what their lives meant in their own time and for the future of the United States.
**********
A favorite intellectual pastime of mine growing up was playing “what-if” with history. Speculating as to the ramifications of counterfactuals throughout the course of American events was, in a sense, a way for me to better understand the weight of historical crossroads and the significance of which route was eventually taken. One such counterfactual that I played with rather frequently was “What if Martin Luther King Jr. was never shot?”. MLK represented a larger-than-life persona to me as a child. Thus, it seemed plain to me that should Dr. King have never been assassinated, he would have eventually attained political office of some sort, and perhaps even made a serious bid for the United States presidency. My knowledge of the history of the civil rights movement was fairly limited at the time and I remember being amazed when I first discovered that Jesse Jackson, who I had already previously known as a significant Democratic contender for the presidency in 1984 and 1988, was himself a notable member of that very same civil rights movement that brought an end to segregation. King was for so long the sole face of the civil rights movement in my adolescent brain. This revelation concerning Reverend Jackson opened my mind to the fact that many other civil rights leaders of the 1960s did in fact go on to impactful political careers. It would be shortly after this realization that I learned of John Lewis as a long-time member in the House of Representatives.
Lewis, curiously enough, became my counterfactual come to life, despite Jackson having been the one to run for president rather than Lewis. I suppose my mental elevation of Lewis over even such a significant figure as Jackson was due to Lewis’s status as an institution of Congress, a reputation which my counterfactual often bestowed upon an elderly Martin Luther King. Knowing of John Lewis and his decades-long reputation was at once exciting and saddening. My fictional America with its elder statesman Dr. King did not bear the same racial turbulence or inequities that, even to my young teenage mind, did exist in real life. While I was thrilled to discover that the concept of a 1960s civil rights leader becoming a noted congressional leader was not that far-fetched, I could not help but be disappointed that even that great progress did not, in fact, equate to the elimination of American racism in its entirety.
Coincidentally, this unfortunate reality could not be more clear than it is now, as we mourn the passing of the giant that was John Lewis. In the past few years, the more overtly racist elements of our society have been rearing their ugly heads, and the more stealthy elements of racial inequity have been coming into sharper focus with the coronavirus’ outsized impact on communities of color and the terrible frequency of unjust deaths of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement or under the watch of other authority figures. John Lewis should be remembered as representative of the tremendous leap that America has made in racial justice over a few short decades. His death marks the end of an era, but we should not interpret that as an end of injustice. This new era that we find ourselves in is littered with its own problems. With a new post-Lewis era comes a need for new people like John Lewis, visionaries and fighters for a nation of level footing.
**********
My exposure to Herman Cain, perhaps surprisingly, came before my “discovery” of John Lewis. My interest in politics first developed in late 2011 as numerous Republican candidates were jockeying for the opportunity to face President Barack Obama in the 2012 election. My parents, both Republicans, were rather underwhelmed with the candidates they saw. After initially leaning towards supporting Michelle Bachman, they quickly became disaffected by the field as a whole and were unsure if they would even back a candidate that year. In my mid-teens at the time, I felt rather bad for my parents and tasked myself with researching all the Republican candidates running for president that year. This was my first real dip into politics, and I unnecessarily limited my options to just Republicans at the time. (It would not be until the 2016 election that my enforced dichotomy of “generally good Republicans versus generally bad Democrats” would be amended to “generally bad Republicans and Democrats”). As I researched the candidates, I began to grow a sense, largely influenced by my parents’ views at the time, of what made a politician worthy of support. In many ways, my foundational qualification in this regard has not changed since then. Then, as now, I sought a person of genuinely good character and a fervent desire to help people (as naive as that may sound). With this in mind, I initially became convinced that Herman Cain, at the time just beginning to surge in the polls, was the one for the job. I brought my findings to my parents and offered my argument that the millionaire restaurant magnate was deserving of their support.
Similar to my idealization of a counterfactual America with an elderly MLK, I had a similarly idealized view of what a Cain presidency would entail. Cain passed my basic litmus test that he was pro-life regarding abortion and, though I was admittedly unknowledgeable about economic issues, his “9-9-9” plan felt deserving of a chance in implementation. But it was not simply these issues that inspired my idealization of Herman Cain’s candidacy. Even though I recalled that my parents did not vote for Barack Obama in 2008, I do recall them recognizing the gravity and historical progress of electing our nation’s first Black president. It was a common thing for my parents to say that while they did not agree with President Obama politically, they were glad that America finally made that jump. The prospect of an election in 2012 in which both major parties were running African-Americans seemed like the next big leap to me, a possibility just within our national reach that could push our history of racism farther behind us. Even at the time I understood (if not fully quite yet) that the modern Democratic Party was generally more favorable to the goal of a more diverse American government. The Republicans, I unfortunately noted at the time, did not seem quite as concerned about this. Therefore, I felt that for the Republican party to nominate an African-American for the presidency would be another big leap that needed to occur on the road to burying racism. With my hopes flying high, I boarded the “Cain train” with youthful zeal.
This would last for only a month, as November 2011 brought allegations of sexual misconduct against the Republican contestant. This moment shocked me to my core; that a public figure I had placed such hopes on could have such a flaw of character was rather devastating. In retrospect, that moment likely planted the earliest seeds of political cynicism in my mind, seeds that flourished and bloomed in the past four years. My idealization of a possible Cain presidency may have died, but the fall of the Cain presidential campaign still left me yearning for a GOP with more concern for the plight of racial minorities. It is easy to forget that Herman Cain was, for at least a brief time, considered a frontrunner for the Republican nomination for the presidency. That was the first time that could be said for an African-American in Republican history (Ben Carson almost achieved a frontrunner status in late 2015 but never quite experienced the surge that Cain did four years earlier).
When I refer to Cain as “the giant who might have been”, I do not mean this with any disrespect to the achievements that Cain did accomplish. I rather refer to those few weeks in October 2015 when a Black Republican president seemed a very real possibility. Who is to say how successful a Cain administration would have actually been? But I do not think it can be disputed that if Cain had won the presidency in 2012, that achievement itself would have marked him as a “giant” of our times. But now it is simply another counterfactual. Initially 2012 and 2016, in people such as Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, and others; seemed to mark a slow but hopeful transition toward a more diverse Republican party. Unfortunately, these past four years have actually seen the reverse. There are now less Republican women and people of color in Congress than there were in the seemingly sunny days before the 2016 election. The hope of an America where both major parties were racially diverse that I saw in Herman Cain’s 2012 presidential campaign now seem more distant. You could say that Cain’s death is also the end of an era, an era in which race seemed to be on a slow course to being an apolitical issue, yet an era that never realized that potential. As we enter this new era of seeming setbacks, there is also a call for a new Herman Cain of sorts, or, more accurately, many new Herman Cains. Not in the sense of his moral failings, but towards the end that the Republican Party, as well as the Democratic Party, might be as diverse as the American population.
**********
In saying goodbye to John Lewis and Herman Cain, we are, in a way, saying goodbye to an age of progress. These two men embodied journeys from obscurity to national import. It is difficult and sad to say goodbye to such an era when our present troubles seem so numerous and at times unyielding. Lewis and Cain might not have seen the end of racism entirely. However, we might still learn the lesson that overly idealistic counterfactuals or longing for “what might have been” should not get in the way of the real and difficult work that we must perform to better realize that final aim of racial equality.
תגובות