I have one living grandparent; she turns 89 in November (the same month she birthed my late father). On her 89th birthday, we may be celebrating the beginning of nothing less than an American miracle: the opportunity to address an African-American as President of the United States.
My grandmother was born in 1919, a little over a year after World War One ended. During that year, 76 black men were lynched in the U.S. During that year, a race riot in Chicago claimed nearly forty lives, mostly blacks. Although women were on the verge of full suffrage, blacks in many states were denied the right to vote through illegal means. Segregation was the law not just of the South, but in most of the North as well. In thousands of towns, an African-American could be harrassed, arrested, or beaten up for the crime of simply being around after sunset. This was America the year my grandmother was born.
What a difference eighty-nine years makes. Yesterday this nation saw an African-American nominated as a candidate for president. Tonight we will see Barack Obama make his acceptance speech as the Democratic Party's candidate for president. During a grandmother's lifetime, this nation has seen changes tragic and amazing, marking a path of violence, determination, and courage, leading to this point in our history. All I can say is: how freaking amazing.
Is eighty-nine years a long time? In an individual's life, it sure is. But it's spit in the ocean of history. In 1919, slavery had been outlawed throughout the country for just over half a century, beginning well over three hundred years before. Banning legislative blocks to black voting occured in 1965, only forty-three years ago. Yes, Barack Obama was alive when a black American's right to vote was finally protected by law. Obama was in college when Michael Donald was murdered by two Ku Klux Klan members in 1981, the last lynching in U.S. history. (There is some controversy whether this case counts as a lynching, but I'm not about to debate it.) Twenty-seven years later - barely a quarter century - a black man will stand before hundreds of millions of people around the world and declare his intention to lead this nation. My grandmother has lived a long life, but the evolution of our democracy between 1919 and 2008 has been far faster than between, say, 1820 and 1919, or even 1620 and 1919.
Would Obama's election instantly fix race relations, or improve the lives of African-Americans, or lead to immediate economic racial equality? Of course not. An Obama victory, in this line of thought, is symbolic at best. But for many African-Americans' lives, faced with poverty, prison, gangs, discrimination, AIDS, and inequality, a little symbolism goes a long way. What Barack Obama (and Hillary Clinton, for that matter) have done this year is strip away the hypocrisy this nation has been burdened with for so long, that naively democratic notion that "anybody can become president." Thanks to Obama and Clinton, I can tell any child in Chicago or Detroit, Mississippi or Maine, Hyde Park or Garfield Park, "Yes, you can be President" and, more than that, believe it myself.
Eighty-nine years, Nana. Can you believe it?
