Toddler, teen and governor impacted

us being here.”

Carter was born in the 1920s, Clinton in the 1940s, Obama in the 1960s — each growing up in a different era when it comes to race relations.

When he succeeded the race- baiting Lester Maddox as governor of Georgia in 1971, Carter ordered King’s portrait hung in the state Capitol and defended him to a convention of Georgia lawyers and judges in a speech that gained him national attention.

He was the first in a wave of “New South” politicians trying to move beyond the racial divisions of the past, and the first Southern candidate to win the presidency ( without first succeeding to it by assassination) since the Civil War.

As for Clinton, he told the tens of thousands of marchers who crowded the National Mall that he had listened to the speakers at the original March on Washington from Little Rock, where he was about to start his senior year in high school.

“They opened minds, they melted hearts, and they moved millions — including a 17- year- old boy watching alone in his home in Arkansas,” Clinton said. In his memoirs, he wrote that King’s speech, along with his handshake with President John Kennedy at Boys Nation a few months later, became the key moments that solidified his determination to go into politics.

Obama, who was a toddler in Hawaii at the time of the original march, hardly needed to reflect on the meaning of the civil rights movement to him personally, given the historic nature of his election in 2008. In a speech that stretched for nearly a half- hour, almost twice as long as King’s original address, the president praised the nation’s progress over the past half- century but pressed a political agenda of what remained to be done.

“The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own,” he said, a reference to a quotation that King often used. The president cited in particular stubborn and growing economic disparities. Noting that the demonstration had been titled the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, he asked, “For what does it profit a man, Dr. King would ask, to sit at an integrated lunch counter if he can’t afford the meal?”

King had spoken in the stirring cadences of a preacher, not usually Obama’s manner. But in passages recalling the struggles of the era, Obama spoke with emotion reminiscent of the early speeches that propelled him to the presidency.

( The two living former Republican presidents, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, cited health problems in declining invitations to attend the commemoration.)

In the wake of the civil rights movement and the legislation that followed, both political parties were reshaped — the Republicans winning the allegiance of white Southerners who had long been Democrats, and the Democrats able to count the growing number of black voters as their most loyal supporters.

The unshakable allegiance among African- American supporters helped Clinton survive impeachment and enabled Obama to win re- election despite stubbornly high unemployment — although the partisan racial divide in American politics is presumably not exactly what King had in mind, that afternoon in 1963.