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Dear Friend and Reader:
ONE THING I’ve been thinking about a lot the past few days is what it would be like for Martin Luther King to have seen Barack Obama’s speech Thursday night. Dr. King of all people would understand that this was not the symbol of progress, but the thing itself. Whether Barack wins or loses, what matters is that he is a contender for president of the United States.
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Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, July 1939: “Colored” water fountains were fixtures throughout the South during the Jim Crow era. Photo by Russell Lee.
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I was born in 1964, and within my lifetime, “separate but equal” facilities still existed. It may seem outrageous to any young person today, but until 1965, in our country, African Americans had to use different bathrooms than Caucasians. It was not until 1967 that the Supreme Court ruled in a case called Loving v. Virginia that blacks and whites could legally marry one another.
For those unfamiliar with history, this was fully 100 years after the abolition of slavery: you know, white folks at the front of the bus and colored folks at the back.
Now we have an African-American presidential candidate, and not only that, a good one. He speaks in full sentences and he can spell his own name and he went to Columbia University in New York City. He has ideas and an aura of authentic dignity. He has spent time living out of the country doing something besides shooting people. He is promising to lead the country on some course other than open war and corporate greed at every possible opportunity.
I have vivid images in my mind of his mom schlepping him around Honolulu as a kid, struggling to pay the bills. He was raised by a single mother, not in a model 2.4 kid, mother, father and Fido household of Americana mythology. He is from an actual normal American family. He has, no doubt, personally gone grocery shopping. He grew up black in the United States, which is an extremely difficult thing to do; that distinction alone has about a one in three chance of landing you in jail in our era. When you have that experience, you know what it means to struggle with the unspoken rules of our society.