WASHINGTON — Setting aside their discord on the Iraq war, eight Democratic presidential candidates presented a largely united front in their third debate Thursday night, vowing to fight racial bias and improve day-to-day living conditions for all Americans.
The debate at Howard University on issues considered key to black voters came hours after a Supreme Court ruling that barred the use of racial guidelines to integrate public schools, a decision roundly condemned by the candidates.
"To say today that you're going to exclude race as a means of allowing for the diversity in our communities is a major step backwards," Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut said, "and as president of the United States, I would use whatever tool is available to me to see to it that we reverse this decision today."
Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who would be the country's first black president, invoked Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights lawyer who became the first African American on the U.S. Supreme Court. Obama credited his own rise to the work of Marshall and others who waged the legal battle that culminated in Brown vs. Board of Education, the court's 1954 ruling banning school segregation.
"If it hadn't been for them, I would not be standing here today," Obama said. "And it was their fundamental recognition that for us to achieve racial equality was not simply good for African Americans, but it was good for America as a whole, that we could not be what we might be as a nation unless we healed the brutal wounds of slavery and Jim Crow."
As they pledged steps to relieve the disproportionate effect of poverty, AIDS and other ills on African Americans, several candidates portrayed racism as an enduring fracture in American society that a president must take action to repair.
"The march is not finished," said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
The debate, nationally televised on PBS and moderated by talk-show host Tavis Smiley, offered the Democrats a forum before a predominantly black audience to court one of the party's most loyal constituencies. Nationally, about one in five Democratic primary voters is black, although the proportion varies widely by state.
African Americans are especially influential in South Carolina, one of the first states to hold a presidential primary; they account for about half the vote in the Democratic contest there.
