MEMPHIS, TENN. — Forty years after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the race-infused 2008 presidential election campaign came Friday to the motel where the civil rights icon was gunned down.
But in an example of how this campaign has challenged traditional notions of race and politics, the only candidates who made the pilgrimage to the Lorraine Motel were Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain.
Sen. Barack Obama, vying to become the first black U.S. president, marked the solemn anniversary nearly 600 miles away in Fort Wayne, Ind., where he carefully invoked King's economic message as much as his racial one.
"It's worth reflecting on what Martin Luther King was doing in Memphis 40 years ago," Obama said at a racially mixed town-hall meeting, reminding the crowd of King's support for striking sanitation workers. "It was a struggle for economic justice."
Clinton and McCain also talked Friday of King's broader legacy. And McCain pointedly apologized for opposing a federal holiday honoring King when he was a young congressman.
But it was the distance from Fort Wayne to Memphis that delineated the new contours of this presidential contest.
"You can't imagine a black candidate like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton not being in Memphis to give a speech," said Joe Hicks, the former head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Just a year ago, Obama took a very different approach, making a point of going to Selma, Ala., to commemorate the anniversary of the 1965 civil rights march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
In Selma, Obama, the son of a white mother and a Kenyan father, pronounced himself "the offspring of the movement" as he sought to build support in the African American community.
Since then, the Illinois senator has become the front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in large part by presenting himself as a candidate who transcends race. He also is working to get past the uproar that arose from the racially divisive comments of his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
And he is campaigning hard to get the support of white working-class voters in Pennsylvania and other states where Clinton is currently leading.
"Obama is going back to the larger strategy he used up until Rev. Wright, which is to downplay race," said Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who has written extensively about race and just published a book about Obama's candidacy.
