The Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell is a retired United Methodist Minister and a founding member of the United Methodists of Color for a Fully Inclusive Church and the Black Methodists for Church Renewal. He is also a member of the Board of Preachers and Scholars at the Martin Luther King International Chapel and Morehouse College.

I am a retired African-American clergyman who was one of the thousands of "foot soldiers" in the civil-rights movement. (Mississippi, Selma to Montgomery, March on Washington, March on the Boston School Committee, etc.)

It is out of that background that I observe the twists and turns and twists and turns (worth saying twice) that have evolved in response to the candidacy of Barack Obama for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.

1. I have titled these words with a paraphrase of the words of the late theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. In his "The Irony of American History," he writes: "Most of the evil is not done by evil people, but by good people who do not know that they are not good." I have observed that among some in the African-American community, some who are civil-rights icons and now within the Hillary Clinton campaign, "good people" are saying/doing things that are not good.

2. There were those in the African-American community who raised questions about the "blackness" of Barack Obama. They spoke as though there was an agreed-upon definition of blackness and/or as persons who seemed to feel they had a "patent" on their particular and often narrowly conceived definition. In most cases, thank God, those moments of "niggardly" (I use a word that I think is appropriate in response to the above, even though I have never used it before) activity are behind us.

3. Then there were those politicians of African descent who rejected the Obama candidacy because they were "expected to" in light of their "relationship" with the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton. Certainly some of those persons rejected the Obama candidacy out of conviction, but how much of that conviction was shaped by the meaning of the Latin phrase "quid pro quo." ("I scratched your back, now it is time for you to scratch mine.")

4. Most recently, one of our heroes of "The Movement" declared that "Bill Clinton is as black as Barack Obama … He probably has gone with more black women than has Obama … I was just clowning." This was said in an effort to contrast the "experience" of Hillary Clinton with that of Barack Obama? What a peculiar and convoluted way of doing that.

5. And then this week, the Clinton campaign (not really condoned by the Clinton campaign) suggests that Barack Obama should be rejected because the Republicans would "jump all over him if he were the Democratic Party candidate … Questions would be raised about his drug use in the past by the Republicans and that would surely mean his defeat."

How do we celebrate the racial/cultural gains that have been made by people of color when at "crunch times" (issues of immigration and election of a presidential candidate), we observe "the same old same old," couched in more subtle terms spoken by people who claim to know better?

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