Jan 20, 2008

When I was a child in 1960’s Topeka, Kansas I was very attuned to the centenary of the American Civil War. My father was a civil war buff and his father-in-law, George Robb, was too. To me that war was all about slavery/race and what it meant to be an American citizen. The schools I attended had just been newly integrated by the Supreme Court in the famous case overturning the Topeka School Board’s racial segregation.

When my family moved into our new home on Mulvane Street it was next door to the house my Mother had lived in. That home had also been newly purchased and occupied. Their youngest daughter announced to me that she didn’t want to have anything to do with “niggers.” I was probably 9 at the time, starting second grade, and she was 4 or 5.

I collected stamps and each year of the early sixties there was a new postage stamp commemorating a key battle of each Civil War year Shiloh, Gettysburg, Antetim.

As I thought about how long black americans would have to wait before a real color blind society took hold I anticipated that progress would proceed at the same pace. It had taken 100 years from the end of the Civil War to get to integrated schools (some integrated schools). That was about 4 generations. I expected full equality to take as long meaning I’d have to live to be one hundred before it happened.

Fifty years have passed since I pondered that timeline and today I’m 58. We aren’t there yet but today when I woke up on vacation in Florida in the same time zone as Washington D.C. where crowds of jubilant people are congretating to note the inauguration of a “black” American President I noted that the light filtering in my window matched the dim light in the television images of huge crowds thronging the Capital Mall.

This is the first time in my life that we will have a President younger than me. His mother could have been a neighbor – a white woman from Kansas just like my Mother. Her son Barack was born almost exactly one hundred years after the start of the Civil War. I was ten. It was not only “unthinkable” back then for a white woman to bear a black child it was illegal in a dozen or more states for a white woman to marry a black man. Now her son is President of the United States fulfilling that old saw that any child could grow up to be President.

To say I’m proud to be an American is a woeful understatement. This is a great day and in my heart I’m part of that crowd on the mall of the nation’s capitol.

I

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