As you stood in line to vote Tuesday morning, maybe you felt history’s hand on your shoulder. It was Clarence Mitchell Jr. And maybe you felt another hand, which was Thurgood Marshall’s. Two black men out of West Baltimore, who helped give America a conscience, each of them gone long years now. But maybe you could feel their ghostly presence as you lined up to cast your ballot.
Without them, perhaps there is no Barack Obama story such as this moment’s. Mitchell, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whispering in the ears of the U.S. Congress about simple fairness. And Marshall in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, urging it to let black and white children attend public schools together.
Obama wins the presidency, and all of America should recall those whose struggle made it possible. This isn’t about politics, and it isn’t about party. It’s about America, in its 232nd year, finally living up to its promise about judging people on their character and not their race.
And maybe you sensed others in the voting line. Maybe you thought about Du Burns, who spent years as a towel attendant at Dunbar High School, confined by his color, before he could become the first African-American mayor of Baltimore and calm an edgy city with his gentle ways.
Or Kurt Schmoke, who grew up as Washington wrestled with the great civil rights laws. At long last, black citizens gained the right to vote, the right to fair employment, the right to attend schools and live in neighborhoods previously denied them. Schmoke turned this opportunity into a splendid education and a dozen years at Baltimore City Hall.
Obama rides to the White House on such shoulders.
And not only theirs. A nation of ordinary citizens, biding their time across the years, took us to this moment.
When I stood in line Tuesday morning, I thought about old school friends named Mansfield (Sonny) Newsom and Turhan Robinson, and Michele Winder and Pat Green, too. They kept their faith in America when it wasn’t so easy.
We were all part of the first generation of Baltimoreans, of differing skin color, allowed to go to public school with each other. They came from families denied the most fundamental American rights because of their race.
Newsom and Robinson were there the night a dozen of us tried to celebrate graduation from City College by going to the old Danny Dickman’s restaurant, on Charles Street – and found ourselves turned away because, as the bully at the door put it, “We don’t allow colored in here.” It was 1963, when Barack Obama was 2 years old, and America still routinely permitted such outrage by tradition, and by whim, and by law.
So Sonny put away whatever anger he felt and spent a career serving in the U.S. Navy, and Turhan went into the Army and came out a major and today serves as an assistant attorney general for Maryland.
And, in that voting line, I thought about Pat Green and Michele Winder, from Garrison Junior High long ago, who grew up in a Baltimore just beginning to integrate. Pat’s son, Davin, was one of 200 U.S. Marines killed in the attack at the Beirut airport 25 years ago. And Michele? As a child, she was barred from certain theaters here because of her color. The last time I saw her, a few years ago, she was a minister looking in on patients at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
They believed in their country and waited for their country to believe in them.
We have a nation of such people and now their waiting has ended. And we’ve heard the analysts tell us why Obama was elected: the awful economy, the repudiation of the Bush years, the graceless McCain campaign until his concession speech.
But we diminish the importance of this election if we overlook the heart of it: a national declaration of racial truce.
America moves slowly, but it moves. We are four decades into the simple acts of people mixing in the workplace and the school yard, and in restaurants and theaters where we once lived utterly separate lives. Familiarity means something; we’re no longer the strangers to each other that we once were.
Tuesday at my polling place, I saw Cleveland Rogers and Deloris Brooks. He is 78 and she is 60. He grew up in Georgia; she, in Alabama. Rogers went off to fight in Korea, and came home to discover, as did Brooks, that their part of America still wasn’t ready to allow them to vote. On Tuesday, they voted for a man who looked like them. He looked like an American.
We should think of Mitchell and Marshall today, and Burns and Schmoke, too. And all those like Rogers and Brooks, who carry Obama to Washington.
