http://news.politicswest.com/politicswestnews/ci_10319847?source=rsPolitico: How far we've come
By The Politico Staff
Article Last Updated: 08/28/2008 01:45:20 AM MDT
In 1961, Robert F. Kennedy predicted that the country could elect a black president in the next 40 years. That's how fast, said the then-attorney general, race relations were changing in America.
Now, 47 years later, Barack Obama stands at the precipice of fulfilling Kennedy's forecast. Wednesday, he became the first minority to win the presidential nomination of a major party, achieving what many felt was impossible given our national obsession with race.
To call this a historic moment feels like understatement. Obama's nomination represents a sea change, a psychological shift in a nation that still struggles with the painful and complicated legacy of slavery.
Fifty-five years ago, whites and blacks learned in separate schools, ate at separate lunch counters and sat in different parts of the bus. Forty-one years ago, Massachusetts elected the first black man to the Senate. Just eighteen years ago, Virginia welcomed the first elected black governor.
And today, a black man will step up to the podium and accept the nomination of a party that only 44 years ago debated whether to seat black delegates from Mississippi at the 1964 convention.
The timing is particularly acute: Obama's acceptance speech falls on the 45th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" address.
Today's singular, symbolic moment thrills and worries African-American leaders, many of whom never expected to see a black president in their lifetime. Obama's success exposes the slow shift away from the political leadership of civil rights heroes to those who have come of age in a not yet post-racial, but decidedly mixed-racial, world.
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"I never, back in the '60s, I never pushed with the idea that sometime in my lifetime a black person would get to be president of the United States. It never occurred to me."
Roger Wilkins, civil rights activist, assistant attorney general for President Lyndon Johnson
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"Selecting Sen. Obama as president of the United States would exceed in its import and its impact what Abraham Lincoln did in 1863 when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. African-Americans to a man, woman and child feel that way."
Robert Johnson, founder of BET and the first African-American billionaire
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/28/america/28race.phpWitnesses to Martin Luther King's dream see a new hope
By Michael Powell Published: August 28, 2008
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At least five veterans of that march (on Washington, 1963) traveled to Denver this week as Democratic delegates, among them Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who is the last man alive of the 10 who spoke that day at the Lincoln Memorial. This son of sharecroppers, who was almost beaten to death by police officers in Selma, Alabama, when he marched with civil rights activists across a bridge, stood on a sun-splashed street in Denver and considered the distance traveled.
His bald head still bears near half-century-old scars.
"We've had disappointments since then, but if someone told me I would be here," Lewis said, shaking that head. "When people say nothing has changed, I feel like saying, 'Come walk in my shoes.' "
Many veterans of the march will gather at televisions in their living rooms Thursday night, or sit with friends and old comrades and watch an event they would have considered impossible not just in 1963, but perhaps in 1983, or 1993. Theirs is often a cautious optimism; time has left them with a sense of the provisional nature of progress.
...
"People ask what has changed, and I say don't trivialize the changes," (Rev. Walter) Fauntroy said. "I'm seeing the fruit of the changes that began in 1964. I was close to Bobby Kennedy. He said to me: 'You know, America's going to change. Forty years from now, a black man could achieve what my brother has achieved.' "
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News footage, "When the Ship Comes In", Bob Dylan & Joan Baez, March on Washington 1963...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vhNCRlXm1sOh the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin'.
Like the stillness in the wind
'Fore the hurricane begins,
The hour when the ship comes in.
Oh the seas will split
And the ship will hit
And the sands on the shoreline will be shaking.
Then the tide will sound
And the wind will pound
And the morning will be breaking.
Oh the fishes will laugh
As they swim out of the path
And the seagulls they'll be smiling.
And the rocks on the sand
Will proudly stand,
The hour that the ship comes in.
And the words that are used
For to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they're spoken.
For the chains of the sea
Will have busted in the night
And will be buried at the bottom of the ocean.
A song will lift
As the mainsail shifts
And the boat drifts on to the shoreline.
And the sun will respect
Every face on the deck,
The hour that the ship comes in.
Then the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold
For your weary toes to be a-touchin'.
And the ship's wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin'.
Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreamin'.
But they'll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it's for real,
The hour when the ship comes in.
Then they'll raise their hands,
Sayin' we'll meet all your demands,
But we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharaoh's tribe,
They'll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they'll be conquered.
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