My Senior Project

This semester I’m going to write my senior project, and I’ve thought a lot about what I wanted to write about. I looked in our textbook and saw that we are going to learn about black Americans fight for justice and equality later this year. I want to use this as a theme for my project. I saw a video of Barack Obama on youtube from Martin Luther King Jr. Day at the Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate. The debate was held January 21 2008 and Obama was asked the question: "If Dr. King were alive today, why do you think he'd endorse you?"

Firstly Obama says that he doesn’t think Dr. King would endorse any of us. Then he makes a very good point Dr. King and he agrees on:”I believe that the change doesn’t happen from the top down – it happens from the bottom up. Dr. King understood that .”

I want to use this as my starting point and look at how change only can happen if the “bottom” chooses to fight for the change the “top” is fighting for. We have watched a movie called “The great debaters” at school, and I want to use this movie in my senior project as an example of people on the bottom fighting for change. I will use Dr. King and Obama as examples of people in the top fighting for change, and my question to answer in my senior project is:

With starting point in the black Americans fight for justice and equality discuss why it is important that change happen from the bottom up. Why can it be difficult to make a change from the top down?