Recent polls suggest the American public is growing frustrated with the pace of “change” under the Obama administration. For Black Americans, any disappointment with the President needs to be put into perspective against the backdrop of American history. The clip below of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders, advocating for Black voting rights at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City should serve to remind us that social change requires persistence. These men, and women such as Fannie Lou Hamer, were fighting for rights that the 15th Amendment to the Constitution purportedly bestowed upon Blacks in 1870. Ninety four years later, Blacks were still seeking the right to vote against the tide of violence, and every conceivable measure – literacy tests, grandfather clause – to deny that right. Barack Obama was elected in November 2008, inaugurated in 2009, and we are just one year into the Obama administration. The real question seems to be not the President’s commitment, but ours.