Obama, Wright, and How the Post-Civil Rights Generation Will Rise to Power  When the Black Freedom Movement withered away from disuse and neglect, it left a generation of enthusiastic young activists-to-be with unprecedented "access" to white dominated institutions, but no movement with which to affiliate. What's a determined mover-and-shaker to do? Get a job, that's what. While the author's friends settled in as corporate lawyers, management consultants and other odd jobs, she was fortunate enough to become - for a time - a "professional feminist" working for "reformist" non-profits. But financial pressures pushed her towards academia, and the realization that "I and others in my group" are "repositories for the Civil Rights generation's left-over hopes and dreams." Barack Obama, she now understands, has been the "symbolic beneficiary and repository" of those dreams - which is not the same thing.