Shock. Disbelief. Joy. Follow me, and I'll tell you why...
When I was a child, I spent most of my time burying myself in the books of various libraries. This was strange for a little black kid where I grew up, but I didn't care. Reading was too much fun. I read mostly non-fiction. I read about Allen Shepard's historic jaunt into space. I read about how turbofan jets worked. I learned about World War II and Medieval blacksmiths. I learned about graphics, and architecture, and biology. When I was twelve I learned about slavery, something I knew intellectually, but not emotionally. I went into my school's library and opened a book about Reconstruction. Inside I saw a picture that terrified me and has stuck with me ever since. It wasn't a picture, but a painting. It depicted men in white hoods and torches gathering outside the shack of a black family in the middle of the night. The family huddled inside, the father sheltering his children in vain from the madness hunting them for no better reason than the nature of their birth. I cried, something that doesn't happen often to me, then or now.
It is, by now, already a cliché, even before this historic night. But tonight I cried. Generations of my people have waited for the tacit proof that things have finally changed enough to cast away the shadows carried in our souls. Racism is not dead, but tonight I believe it is on life support, struggling to breathe, smothered by the glory of multi-racial unity, however newly bold and public, however confined to one side of the political divide.
I am too young to know the civil rights struggle. I see color, but for me it is not the measure of a man. I thank God that I am utterly banal in this aspect. We are, after all, legion. And tonight there is proof to marry the emotion to the notion, evidence to confirm faith. Of course, that evidence has been building for some time now. That is one reason why I am here. And perhaps, finally, I can allow the face of terror in that shack to fade into the dark, to put out the torches of hatred, and wait for the last dying gasp of the palsied ghosts hiding behind their hoods.
I have always been proud of my country, proud of what it has done. But tonight, I am proud of what it has become.