For those who worked in the Civil Rights movement and for those who witnessed, as I did, the horrors of legal apartheid in this country, today is one we'll never forget. Raised in Birmingham in the 1950s and '60s, I went to segregated transportation stations and sat on the "Whites Only" side; I enjoyed Kiddieland and the Alabama State Fair, which black children didn't; I remember the march on Selma and the bombings and demeaning slurs; after sitting in my first integrated audience at Miles College to hear Joan Baez, our group found ourselves stalled on the way home by the Miracle Sunday march toward downtown; I had lengthy conversations with the woman who cooked and cleaned for us about race and about her trip to D.C. for the March on the Washington; and I lost my faith when at church the couple in front of me walked out when black teens walked in, the man muttering "Nigger." I was a child of white privilege living safely in a suburb, but I hated the system and the government that upheld it.I am proud to say that in this Presidential election I voted for the first serious female candidate in the primary and for the new President in November. I am even prouder to be a witness to the outpouring of joy in our election of a man who, as one bystander said on TV today, carries the blood of all the continents.
He is the American story in one person.
What a day.
2 comments:
that was beautiful....beautiful words for a beautiful moment in time....
I want to add this to my original post: "The president’s elderly stepgrandmother brought him an oxtail fly whisk, a mark of power at home in Kenya. Cousins journeyed from the South Carolina town where the first lady’s great-great-grandfather was born into slavery, while the rabbi in the family came from the synagogue where he had been commemorating Martin Luther King’s Birthday. The president and first lady’s siblings were there, too, of course: his Indonesian-American half-sister, who brought her Chinese-Canadian husband, and her brother, a black man with a white wife." (I have borrowed this sentence from an article titled "In First Family, a Nation's Many Faces" by Jodi Kantor.) How motley can one family be? And his great-great-grandfather was Irish!
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