Affluent, well-educated black people were being appropriated as symbols of racial progress — and held up as proof that racism no longer mattered — back when Mr. Obama was still a youth in short pants.
The double bassist Art Davis always cited Wilder as an example of racial progress, and continually expressed his admiration for him as a musician and a man.
Fifty years ago this week, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, a piece of legislation that was hailed as a hallmark of racial progress.
In an interview with New York magazine published this week, he described the idea of race relations in America and racial progress as "nonsense" and declared that there was none.
Levi Jackson, a star running back whose selection as Yale's first black football captain in November 1948 drew national attention as a symbol of racial progress in American life, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Detroit.
ATLANTA — Since Barack Obama's election last week as the nation's first black president, street vendors and online stores have been hawking T-shirts, buttons and posters juxtaposing images of him with those of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as twin pillars of racial progress.
The complex racially charged drama that led to Martin's death is indicative of both our history and our rapid and uneven racial progress as a society.
They point to the explosion of the black middle-class, the proliferation of black multi-millionaires, diversified police bureaucracies, and a black president as incontrovertible evidence of racial progress.
As a voice for both Christian conservatism and racial progress, he served as a bridge between the Old South and the New, and as a model for a region struggling to shed its worst baggage without losing its identity.
