Event of My Lifetime

Event of My Lifetime

Barack Obama, African-American among his many identities, has become the President-elect of the United States. He accomplished this tour de force on his own. It was not due to affirmative action. He is not a token black. He won, fair and square, by running an extraordinary campaign and by inspiring enough people of all cultures and walks of America to vote for him and campaign for him.

President-elect Obama's election means a great deal to me.

Born in 1939, I grew up in a town on the Ohio River that, although touted by some as a stop on the Underground Railroad in the nineteenth century, a bastion of Abolition then, was strictly segregated all the years of my growing up, with a small African-American neighborhood at the north end of Broadway.

I am mortified to recall a minstrel show staged in about 1950 here. It had six "end men," white males in "blackface," cracking racially offensive jokes. I was naive about a lot of things and I recall becoming increasingly shocked by the pervading racism, cruel and crude, among several of the adolescents I knew and hung with.

Our high school yearbooks actually segregated the individual snapshots of the black students in our classes at the end of the pages for each class. We had a music teacher who deliberately excluded all African-Americans from band and choir and nobody ever challenged him about it while I was in school. Movie theaters were segregated. The municipal swimming pool, all restaurants, and all barber shops excluded blacks entirely.

Until Indiana grudgingly ended school segregation in the early 1950s, Johnstown’s black school was declared "separate but equal" -- as the Supreme Court in Plessy vs. Ferguson had nonsensically ruled in 1896. Although heroic teachers and students worked there, and many excellent graduates came from the school in spite of its deficiencies, that school was inherently unequal.

Discrimination was a silent conspiracy in public. As for the teachers we had for American history and social studies and current events, they were generally idiots. Or cowards. Just as my sophomore year of high school ended, Plessy vs. Ferguson was thrown out. It had been superseded by the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka decision, to wit, “integration is the law of the land.” My recall is that teachers glossed over even the facts of that momentous ruling, let alone the implications, getting back to more comfortable material, like George Washington’s sailing a silver dollar across the Potomac.

My dad was born in Kentucky in 1898 and, although he himself was not a pathological racist – he did not hate – he was taught at home and church that segregation was Biblically mandated, and he sincerely preached to us that separation of the races was morally imperative.

My mother's side of the family had and still has members who hold some of the most scurrilous, hate-filled views of African Americans I have ever encountered. I forgo talking with them, clamming up now when they hint at tirades or crude social commentary. Come to think of it, my dad's side had plenty of hateful racists too, whose attitude was not tempered by Christianity and idealism as his own attitude was.

I read a lot as a child and adolescent, much of it junk but also some pretty decent things, classical and modern literature, which also gave me a window on a world larger than little old Johnstown, Indiana. I read of current events and drew my own conclusions. I tended to be a rebel and a maverick and a malcontent, coming by that honestly, and the status quo with regard to racial relations in my immediate environment just didn't agree with me.

And I let those about me know it. At home we were not "polite," so we did "talk about religion and politics." So I disagreed vehemently with not only my friends but also my family at times. We talked a lot about race, in high school and in college. Always in all-white company: black people were an abstraction, not real human beings we actually knew – just like us! My brothers and sisters, all older, were intelligent and articulate and loved to debate, and in retrospect I am grateful to them for their contributions to my education.

I hope I don’t sound too pious. I’ve had my prejudices, and my education has been slow, halting, and painful. I’ve made some terrible blunders that I recall with shame. But I’ve been willing to learn.

My first attempt to act on my emerging ideals regarding racial equality and harmony was to apply to the new Peace Corps, and to ask to be assigned to sub-Saharan Africa. How thrilled I was when I was accepted! In October 1962 I set off for UCLA for training for living in Nigeria as an American emissary and teaching secondary school there. We trainees would gather evenings and among other activities often sing “We Shall Overcome.”

My idealism relating to freedom in this great nation got a gigantic boost when at age 21 in 1960 I campaigned for and voted for John F. Kennedy to be President, and he defeated Richard Nixon. We had a new leader, young and idealistic too, whose first executive order was to create the Peace Corps!

When I came home in 1965 the civil rights movement was apace and going brutally in the South. Dixie, particularly Alabama and Mississippi, was an inferno of hatred and strife that year. I wanted to have the courage to be a civil rights activist, participating in Freedom Rides and sit-ins, helping with voter registrations, but I had serious problems, most notably with alcohol, that kept me from doing so.

My own hometown had desegregation activities on its small scale and, mirabile dictu, without violence. At last all commercial institutions in the town removed their color bars. An undertone of racism still exists today but it is not as bad as it was. At least anybody can in theory live and work wherever they want, because the law is on their side. They’ve had to sue and demonstrate to get their due rights a good many times since the sixties but blatant Jim Crow is all but gone.

My return home was more than four decades ago. When the daughter of JFK endorsed Barack Obama in a New York Times op-ed column on January 27 this year, that spark of idealism I’d felt during her father’s Presidency was ignited again. Yes! Why not?

This has been an event of my lifetime.