There are 57 blacks out of the roughly 300 people on the Obama campaign’s national finance committee. Each member commits to collecting at least $250,000 in campaign contributions, a formidable task that typically requires deep business networks, something relatively few blacks had until fairly recently.
The list of top Obama bundlers includes people like John W. Rogers Jr., the founder of Ariel Investments, the country’s first black-owned money management firm; William Kennard, the first black chairman of the Federal Communications Commission; and Mr. Davis, who drove across the country 45 years ago as a newly minted college graduate to take part in the March on Washington on 1963 and went on to serve as the first black parks commissioner of New York City and the first black president of Lincoln Center.
Mr. Kennard and Mr. Rogers are among a half-dozen black bundlers who have raised more than $500,000 for Mr. Obama, putting them in a select group of just three dozen fund-raisers.
Among my nightmares is the resurgence of a blue dog coalition in the Democrat party that looks like a rogues gallery of Colin Powells and Thurgood Marshalls. Of course there are such chaps in every major metro under 100 Black Men and such Boule banners I assume, but I expect not so many ideologically conservative. So while it is true that some old Talented Tenth dreams die hard, there has been but only one that I've nursed along through my conversion to the Right. That is Aggregation.
Aggregation to me is a sort of breakthrough at the brass rail and Harvard Club - some conglomeration of African American families with Old School Values and old, or at least aging money. When there was Reggie, the baron of Beatrice, there was some beacon of hope, because his mentor was the great Lee Archer. Now I suspect Archer would berate me for spending so much time in the airy world of the chatting classes, but I cannot deny the part of me that is a writer - a non-profit writer. Yet he's still the man who represents the sort of company I rather expected to emerge in these post Civil Rights days. As it stands far too many are still too shy or muddle-headed to cop to conservatism. Reggie is gone, but we still have men like Richard Parsons, a Republican.
Chances are we're not likely to get such a story out of the Times about those like Parsons or Denzel Washington and Republicans they would support, and we bloggers slog it out in relative anonymity bearing our burdens. But I think as easily as we got Obama, America will see its future in yet another political phenom on the Right. It is only a matter of time and exposure.
As that time ticks away, so does much of my enthusiasm for a proper Aggregation, and I feel less need for a black nationalist anything - even endowment for black highbrow history and such things I've dreamed of doing when I was more certain than I am now that riches were in my future. After all Thelonius Monk doesn't need a 50 acre campus and conservatory built on a hill. We just need not to lose those masters, a far less expensive task. Modesty, perhaps, is the best approach to all that Aggregation stuff.
Yet and still there are days when I wish my bonhommie with the likes of those I grew up with and around, those social skills and associations which made it natural for me to assume leadership in various black organizations in my youth translated into more well capitalized pursuits. There are days when I look at the folks around me and wish we all had a couple orders of magnitude more scratch plus the ways and means to keep it and pass it on. Every time I see a black kid wearing a t-shirt funded by white liberal paternal political sentiment be it wrongheaded or not, I wish it was from a foundation he might have known the board of, growing up in his own black neighborhood. Every once in a while I hate the fact that so many of us are sponsored, that we fill out applications, that we are looked up in databases, that our connections to power are modern and abstract. Every once in a while I wish there were organic dynasties of more than rhythm and blues.
Wouldn't it be nice to head back to Bowen, North Carolina and hang out with my cousins who own several thousand acres out that way? Wouldn't it be nice to know that the Bowen Building just two blocks north of the White House is one of the properties I own but couldn't account for in an off the cuff interview question? Wouldn't it be nice to be a part of a legacy or a process of building one in the private sector? You might say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
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