Maraniss on Obama

Of all of the Improbable-Journey-of-Barack-Obama articles out there, I'm calling David Maraniss Restless Searcher On an Improbable Path(of WaPo) piece the best one.

Goosebumps inducing passage:

On the evening of April 4, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as he stood on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. One of the young aides looking up to him from the parking lot, waiting for King to come with them for dinner, was Jesse Jackson, then 26, who ran the Southern Christian Leadership Conference office in the northern outpost of Chicago. In one of the more dramatic and controversial moments of Jackson's early career, he flew home the next day and appeared at a memorial session of the Chicago City Council still wearing the shirt he had worn the day before. "I come here with a heavy heart, because on my chest is the stain of blood from Dr. King's head," he said. "He went through, literally, a crucifixion. I was there. And I'll be there for the resurrection."

Twenty years later, in 1988, Jackson sought the Democratic presidential nomination for a second time. He received nearly 7 million votes and won primaries in Southern states that had been at the heart of the long political struggle for voting rights: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia. And 20 years after that, the television cameras seemed transfixed by the sight of that same Jesse Jackson, back in Chicago, standing in the crowd on election night 2008, tears streaming down his cheeks as he watched Barack Obama step onto the stage as the president-elect of the United States and evoke the words of the two great martyred figures of America's difficult racial history, Lincoln and King. Human interaction is never as uncomplicated as the symbolism, and Jackson did not always accept Obama's rise without envy and skepticism, but here, it seemed, was the political resurrection that he had long ago foreshadowed.