We Have Reasons to Be Proud

By the morning of November 5, 2008 there is an excellent chance that a majority of the people in the United States of America will have elected a Black man President of the United States.

By the morning of November 5, 2008 there is an amazingly good chance that the people of the United States will have elected someone whose father was African and whose mother was Caucasian.

By the morning of November 5, 2008, there is a wildly wonderful possibility that the people of the United States will elect someone who grew up in a non traditional family. He was raised by his single mother and his grandmother.

How far we have come in such a short period of time.

I remember my first visit to my relatives in New Orleans. It was in 1953 and I was fourteen. It was the first time I had ever seen the segregated south. There were water fountains for “Colored” and water fountains for “White”. There were adjustable seats in the trolleys where the rear section was “Colored” and the forward section was “White”. It seemed pretty stupid to me at the time and I liked to hear the story about how my grandma and her younger sister would come down South to visit and that the two old ladies would always march down to the “Colored” section and sit down. Nobody tried to tell my Grandma what to do.

It would be two years after my visit that Emmett Till, a fourteen year old Black boy from Chicago was beaten, shot and killed in Money, Mississippi. His crime was to have whistled at a white woman. He was beaten so badly that his face was unrecognizable. It was a a ring that he wore that provided clear identification.

It was only a few years earlier that the president of the United States abolished segregation in the military. Black soldiers did not mix with white before then. The catalyst for this change happened during the Korean War. A platoon of Black soldiers took a hill. Their white soldiers thought they were North Korean and shot them down.

A year after my visit to New Orleans the United States Supreme Court struck down segregation in the schools and Jim Crow began to die. It was hastened on its way by a whole generation of young folks, black and white, marching, sitting, , waiting for service in restaurants, getting people to vote. But uniquely, the leadership of this movement was mainly young black men.

The late Chou En Lai, Premier of the Peoples Republic of China was a most sophisticated and well educated man. He had attended the Sorbonne in Paris. He knew a great deal about world history. A few years ago, some interviewer asked Chou whether the French Revolution had any effect on China and the world. He thought for a moment and answered, “It’s too soon to tell.” The French Revolution had been around for almost two hundred years. The Chinese have a different historical perspective.

A hundred and fifty years ago, the United States Supreme Court held that a Negro had no rights that a White man was bound to respect. That was the law of the land.

This same Supreme Court decision held that all people of African descent that were brought as slaves could never be citizens of the United States. It held that the United States Congress could not prohibit slavery in the federal territories that would become states. That was the Dred Scott decision of the United States Supreme Court. That was the law of the land one hundred and fifty years ago. Some perspective: when I was born there were people alive who were alive when the Dred Scott decision was made. Not so long ago.

Less than a decade after this decision, slavery was over. Less than a decade later, Congress and the country amended the Constitution extended the right to vote regardless of “previous condition of servitude.”

How fast things change. How fast people drop old beliefs.

And then there’s the family. In that dulled period of the 1950’s the happy family was all over the place, on t.v., the movies. Divorces were much rarer then.

I went to a wonderfully nurturing very small camp called Journey’s End Farm. There were rarely more than twenty-four of us but there were a significant number of kids from “broken homes”. (My home was broken when I was nine and my dad died).

Single mothers were off my radar when I was a kid. With the exception of my own, of course. There just weren’t too many of them around.

When I was a kid the one thing that was quite a bit weirder than “broken homes” was “mixed marriages”. My step father had a very close friend, Ray Stowe. He was a direct descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His wife, Bea, was Black. I think that they did not have kids because of just how complicated that could be. Even my open minded mother would lower her voice when talking about “mixed marriages” like it was a problem to be endured by those engaging in it.

We, the people of the United States by the morning of November 5, 2008 very likely will have elected a man born of a marriage between a Black man and a white woman. We will have elected a man brought up by a single mother and a grandmother.

More than this, we will have elected a man who rose like an American myth through his hard work and persevering to transcend and to help us transcend our false divisions. This truly is an independently tough human being. (The other presidential candidate has rarely done anything new. I mean, after all, he went into the family business of war. No originality there. McCain and Grandsons—Killers of Men. Some Maverick. Raise the Flag. My Country Right or Wrong. All That Jazz.)

It is, perhaps, the unique greatness of the man that allows us to drop our old biases. It is the individuality and honesty of the man that touches us before we even notice the color of his skin. His intelligence and sincerity are intelligent and sincere.

Point is that millions upon millions of voices will be raised to elect a man president who would not have been able to sit in a Woolworth lunch counter if he had been born forty years earlier.

We have got to this point, so many tens of millions of us. No matter what the results of November 4, we have got to this point. And for that we can be proud of ourselves as Americans.