MLK stated he hoped there would come a time "when people shall not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." I pray that this will be so! And to honor the content of MLK's dream, the media must quit splashing around in the superficial redundancy "1st black president" and concentrate on the content of this person rather than his persona. This inaguration can only become symbolic when content and character are judged today; when tomorrow the skin color or gender of an office holder no longer elicits curiosity or fascination. Then, and only then, will this day become a true benchmark in history. Change is incremental but it must be progressive in order to become a continuum. For this, I pray wholeheartedly.
Living History
Occasionally America turns out to be every bit as good as its hype. It's thrilling to be around to witness one of those moments.
PHOTO GALLERY
Backstage with Obama
NEWSWEEK's photographers caught exclusive glimpses of the Democratic candidate down the homestretch
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The American Museum of Natural History threw a spectacular party on New Year's Eve 1999, but perhaps the millennium really arrived there just a few weeks ago. A group of New York City schoolchildren were at an event marking the 150th birthday of Theodore Roosevelt, naturalist and president, and at the end of the visit one of the kids raised his hand. "I have a question," he said. "Was he black?"
History will record that on Nov. 4, 2008, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the first black president of the United States. It is impossible to overstate what that means to this nation.
America is as much a concept as it is a country, but it is a concept too often honored in the breach. The Statue of Liberty welcomes with the words "Give me your tired, your poor." Yet generation after generation of immigrants arrived here to face contempt and hatred until the passage of time, the flattening of accents, turned them into tolerated natives. The Declaration of Independence states unequivocally that all men are created equal. Yet for years the politicians and the powerful seemed to take the gender of that noun literally and denied all manner of rights to women.
But no injustice or prejudice brought to bear by this country against its own people can compare with how it has treated black men and women. Humiliation, degradation, lynchings, beatings, murders. The rights the United States pretended to confer upon all were unthinkingly and consistently denied them: the right to the franchise, to representation, to protection by the justice system.
Literal ownership gave way to something not so different: "When we are moved to better our lot," Richard Wright wrote in 1941, "we do not ask ourselves 'can we do it?' but 'will they let us do it?' " Henry Louis Gates Jr., in the memoir "Colored People," says simply, "For most of my childhood, we couldn't eat in restaurants or sleep in hotels, we couldn't use certain bathrooms or try on clothes in stores." Alice Walker left home for college on a bus and was ordered to move after a white woman complained that she was too near the front.
None of this was so very long ago.
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