Despite the watershed event that was Barack Obama’s election to the presidency last November, the hard work of becoming a post-racial society remains before us, according to civil rights attorney John A. Payton.

Payton, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, was the guest speaker for the University at Buffalo Law School’s Mitchell Lecture on Thursday in John Lord O’Brian Hall on the North Campus in Amherst.

“We all felt the enthusiasm last November and December and in January, but I think our enthusiasm got a little bit ahead of reality,” Payton said.

As he recounted the nation’s tortured struggle with race, law and politics—from the drafting of a Constitution that explicitly excluded black people until the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments up through the 1965 Voting Rights Act — Payton described the process of achieving democracy, fairness and justice as an act of will rather than an inevitability.

Just as it took at least a decade for the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to have an impact, Payton said, the reality is that Obama’s election alone as the first black president will not solve the seemingly intractable problems relating to race and fair access to education, housing, criminal justice, employment and health care.

“But it does present possibilities, because there is now, in our lifetime, a much greater possibility of acknowledging the fundamental nature of these problems and spending time trying to figure out how to solve them,” said Payton, who is based in Washington, D. C.

The current political and social climate for attempting that is toxic, he said, using the ongoing health care debate as an example.

“I think everybody watching knows that it hasn’t been a debate at all; it has been a shouting match,” Payton said.

“It’s not that there aren’t issues [surrounding health care] that deserve debate, but there has been a very dark atmosphere that surrounds the dialogue.”

Payton said “hatred and suspicion” lie at the base of recent questioning of Obama’s citizenship and the legitimacy of his claim to the office of president, for example. “We’ve always had extremists, but the fact that Barack Obama is an African- American, I think, has pushed paranoia to another level,” he said.

The key to dealing with that, Payton added, will be figuring out a way to “marginalize the voices of hatred,” which he said stifle debate instead of encourage it.