This is a long diary, as diaries go. It starts not long after my birth in 1940 and continues through the early sixties. I have always been reluctant to put much of this in writing, but I think that it is appropriate at this juncture. So with apologies for its wordiness, please join me after the jump for my personal journey to Obama:
-- the best is yet to come --
Growing up in West Virginia on the Ohio border, I started school during a brief stint living in Ohio. Kindergarten was inclusive, which is to say that we had one Black kid in our class, with whom I developed a friendship but who was shunned by other kids. My mother, daughter of a steel mill worker, ingrained in me a very important lesson: "There is nobody in this world who is better than you; and you aren’t better than anyone else." So there wasn’t anything "different" about my playmate in my mind.
That admonition from my mother caused me great puzzlement in my early days. We moved back to West Virginia, where I attended the local Catholic grade school in an area with no visible Black population. (Indeed, the only "famous" person to my knowledge who grew up there in my area was Charles Manson!)
I sometimes tell the story of the time we were going to the Park, a fairly good distance from our house. My uncle was driving and I was riding in the back seat. We took a different route than we had on other occasions and I was eagerly taking in all the new and different sights.
A big, new, white brick building at the top of a hill caught my eye and I inquired of my mother: "What is that building?" She responded: "That’s Lincoln High School, the high school for the colored kids." My reaction was one of curiosity and, to some extent, resentment. "Why, I asked myself, do they think they are so much better than us that they have to have their own school?" As I was only about 8 years old at the time, living in a house with my mother, her two sisters, my uncle, my sister and my aunt’s two kids, barely able to make ends meet, it was probably a natural reaction. We were, after all, the poor kids.
[I hasten to add that I never felt "poor" or envious of other people’s possessions. On her salary of $40 a week before taxes, my mother made sure that we had good balanced meals and clothes on our backs. She, though, was resentful of the excesses of the wealthy. I remember how she would proclaim that they could cure poverty in England if they would sell off the crown jewels and how she was disdainful, scornful of "royalty".]
I attended the nearest Catholic High School, from which I graduated in 1957. There was another Catholic High School nearby, not so nice as ours, Blessed Martin de Porres, which I learned was the "Catholic High School for Colored Kids". That was 1954 and, at 14 years old, the realities of enmity toward Black people among my contemporaries was just beginning to come to light and cause me puzzlement. Still it was a shock when Brown v. Board of Education was decided that year and I learned that Lincoln and Blessed Martin were not there because "colored people" wanted to have their own schools. Rather, I was living in a State that required segregated education!
Maybe because we were so near Ohio and Pennsylvania, other forms of segregation weren’t so noticeable. I always sat in the back of the bus, it was my preferred spot and later got me into some trouble during a trip to "the South". Restaurants were not segregated but, as I was to learn, American Legion Post #1 had a counterpart "colored" American Legion Post not more than a block away! Black people lived in a segregated community, though I am not sure whether that was a legal requirement or if, as now in many of our "Northern" communities, it was because of a hostile attitude toward their living in "our" communities.
Integration came easily to Central Catholic High School and to all the other schools in our area. Probably because it was the norm in nearby Ohio, it did not seem to be out of the ordinary in our community. Yet there were several riots in other areas of West Virginia in protest of Brown v. Board of Education. That was shocking to me; truly incomprehensible.
I went on to a brand new Catholic College and graduated in the third graduating class. In my Sophomore year, a Black student enrolled. I remarked to one of the priests on the faculty that I was glad to see that we weren’t a segregated institution, only to have him say: "Well we don’t have to advertise that!" I lost a lot of respect for him that day.
By now, the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement were evolving. The Montgomery Bus Boycott had thrust Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference into a prominent place in the news. (We still could not afford a TV, so I wasn’t able to watch the reports. But did hear about them on radio and read about them in the local paper.) It was painful and confusing for me to learn that my fellow American citizens were being discriminated against in so many areas and to read and hear about brutal attacks, lynchings, bombings, beatings, and other deprivations of basic human rights were taking place in this Nation that I had been taught believes in equality of all men (at the time, I hadn’t yet come to the understanding that the "men" didn’t include women).
In 1960, JFK came to town to campaign during the West Virginia primary. I was the student photographer at the college and borrowed a 4 x 5 Graphlex press camera from a local professional photographer for the occasion. I met his plane at the airport, went into town with his entourage, and was able to spend the entire next day riding the press bus and going with him to all his campaign stops.
In the evening, I went to the TV studio for his interview with the local reporters and was the only one there. That was fortunate, because I was able to walk and talk with him while showing him back to the hotel. Somehow, the campaign had left him on his own to make his way about our little city. I had been a big fan ever since the 1956 convention when he was prominently featured. The excitement of his candidacy was inspiring. His election and inauguration were joyful occasions. It was a new day, a chance for this nation to rid itself of its past and move beyond it. Sadly, political reality intervened to prevent the changes I was looking forward to, at least during his brief tenure as President.
In 1961, following graduation, I went on to graduate school in West Virginia. One of the guys staying at the rooming house I lived in at one point was the son of a famous Black reporter for, I believe, ABC at the UN. He was in the band, had graduated from high school in Pittsburgh, PA with excellent grades and was told that he had to come in the house through the rear basement door! That was unacceptable to me, so I engaged in my first "protest" by refusing to come in through the front door myself. At the time, I thought that was somehow a meaningful statement even though I was the only one who knew what I was trying to say.
In 1963, I got my MS and a job teaching in Pittsburgh, PA. By now, I had already decided that I had to do something, even though I didn’t know what.
But fate intervened. The all women’s Catholic College where I was teaching had an almost exclusively working class student body. We had a lot of informal discussions about what was happening and there was a lot of sentiment that we should do "something" to help.
The Mississippi Thanksgiving Fast for Freedom in 1963 (I can’t find any references to verify the date, but I believe my recollection is accurate) gave us an opportunity to "do something". As I recall, the Thanksgiving Fast For Freedom was sponsored by the National Student Association (later found to be a CIA front). The students organized well. Only two resident students ate in the cafeteria that day, with the money that would have been spent for dinner for the others being donated to the Fast for Freedom.
It was decided that we would go to the local "protest" group to tout the event, probably expecting an outpouring of gratitude. We did get a polite thank you but were invited to join in local efforts to end discrimination, which many of us did.
There is much that happened since then, but it is a subject for another day.
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We have come a long way since those days. Most of our heroes have been murdered or have died. Our opportunity to come together to forge a unified nation in which everyone is able to share its benefits and enjoy its riches was hijacked by the forces who reinstated the politics of divisiveness and reinstated enmity to our society, who sought to divide where we had once hoped to unite.
Barack Hussein Obama, the skinny guy with the funny name, rose, much in the fashion of JFK, to bring us hope, to inspire us to get back on path. We were told that it could not be done and we are now being shown that many are determined that it not be done.
The reaction to Senator Obama’s speech has been encouraging from many quarters, but has been very, very disturbing from others.
Should those who’s invective laced opinion prevail, why would people not feel that Rev. Wright was correct? This is a critical moment for this nation. We can choose to move toward equality and justice for all, or we can provide the proof for those who might lean in that direction that Rev. Wright was correct. The people of this nation are at a crossroads where we have to decide: shall we move to unite or shall we move to ingrain hatred in our culture.
Should we see a sudden mass migration of the so-called "super delegates" away from Senator Obama, I would look for the Rev. Wrights to gain traction, for them to be seen as having been vindicated. If, on the other hand, we accept Senator Obama’s challenge and meet the issues of race and class head on, then the nation can hold its head high and we can look forward to a brighter future.