Barak

The media have at least mentioned what a historic occasion is the nomination of Barak Obama, but only just. Despite my vow to quit watching the nightly news on any of the networks, I tuned in last Wednesday when Obama had locked up the Democratic nomination. It seemed the commentators couldn’t move on quickly enough to the story of Hillary and whether or not she would go after the vice-presidential nomination.

This was Obama’s day and a day of historic proportions, and the television media reduced it to what will become a footnote of the political campaign. Not to take away anything from Hillary Clinton’s own historic campaign, but still. . . .

It all made me reflect back on some of my own experiences involving race in America, only a few of which I will relate here.

In 1967, though I barely understood the significance at the time, “The case is Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 ruling in which a unanimous Supreme Court found that state laws prohibiting interracial marriage violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The decision has been on my mind recently because of the death this month of Mildred Loving, the African American woman who dared to marry a white man and try to live with him in Virginia.” (I quote from an online essay and apologize that I’ve lost the link.)

“. . . My car radio crackled with the tinny voice of Virginia's lawyer urging the court not to usurp the state's "legitimate legislative objective of preventing the sociological and psychological evils which attend interracial marriages."

This was part of the backdrop against which I was being drafted into the army and only months away from landing in Vietnam. I made a quick rush down to the Coast Guard office to see if they were looking for any help but ended up enlisting as a GI in hopes of staying out of the infantry.

In January of 1968, I was at Fort Gordon, Georgia in Signal Corps school. Weekends, we would go into Augusta, where in the bus stations I first encountered drinking fountains and bathrooms labeled “white” and “colored.” I felt like I had landed in a different country.

In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and my company went through a quick day of riot control training in case we had to go into Augusta to put down riots. We were issued rifles and bayonets and confined to the company compound on ready alert for the week. A lot of good we would have done. Fort Gordon was also home to an MP school and an Airborne school, and presumably they would have gone in first. The Signal Corps motto, we said among ourselves, was “Last to Fight!”

Augusta didn’t riot, although plenty of other cities did. In May I was in Vietnam, and racial tensions in my unit were high. They didn’t get any better in the two years I had left in the army.

The struggle for civil rights, and even voting rights, has been a background to my whole like, starting with my earliest memories of the Freedom Riders when I was very young. Some of those early activists were murdered and their murderers are only now being brought to justice, some fifty years later, racist old men with hate still in their eyes. I celebrate their belated convictions.

I watched, as we all did, news reports of demonstrations in Southern cities in which peaceful protesters were beaten, had fire hoses and police dogs turned on them. We watched as National Guard troops, ordered in by President Johnson, escorted black children into newly integrated schools while white parents screamed hateful, shameful slurs at them.

So it says everything to me that we Democrats have now nominated an African-American to be our next president. It seems to me still utterly impossible that I am seeing this in my lifetime. Obama is a remarkable man, but right now he looks to me like a very fragile human being. I see him and I see my own experience of a fifty-year struggle for civil rights in America, an observer’s experience, but still one that has deeply shaped my consciousness. I hope he’s up to it. I hope we all, finally, are.