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Obama, and the day America Changed

by Larry Lubell

Some events really do change the world. Often we don’t recognize their gravity till years later. Last night history was made, and I do believe most people watching understood they were witnessing a critical turning point in American history.

America is the greatest country earth has yet to produce, not because our history is not filled with mistakes; but because we learn from, and correct those mistakes. We don’t burn “Witches” any longer, and collectively we have come to view our westward expansion in the context of the horrors perpetrated against the indigenous population. Truth is, the list of errors, missteps and injustices that are part of our nations history is long, and often, painful to admit. Large segments of our society turned a blind eye to the suffering and mistreatment that made up the daily lives of other Americans. But of all of those evils, slavery stands out as the darkest chapter in our nations history.

Even before we were a nation we were already deep in to the horrors of slavery. In 1663 the Maryland legislature enacted a law that stated ” all Negroes and other slaves within the province, and all Negroes and other slaves to be thereafter imported into the province, should serve during life; and all children born of any Negro should be slaves, as their fathers were, for the term of their lives.”

There were approximately 645,000 black African shipped to what is now the United States and by the time of the 1860 Census, The slave population in the United States had grown to over four million. It is hard to imagine the nightmare of being kidnapped form your home, brought around the world to be sold, then forced to work 14 hour days or to be whipped and tortured at the whim of a man whose position was determined by the color of his skin. It was not unusual for enslaved black women to be raped by their “owners”, or for children to be sold and permanently separated from their families.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 was a turning point for our nation. Lincoln explained his disgust towards slavery, and justification for emancipation by declaring “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong”!

But the end to slavery, while a step, was followed by the Jim Crow laws that legalized segregation between blacks and whites. In 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that separate facilities for whites and blacks were constitutional, resulting in generations of African American Americans growing up in an America who’s laws designated that they should be forced into separate schools, required by law to sit in the back of the bus, or a few segregated tables at the lunch counter. It was not till 58 years later that Thurgood Marshall took the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans. and got the Supreme Court to declare separate facilities by race to be unconstitutional.

While the official laws of this nation slowly started to turn, often the unofficial practices moved at a slower pace. Groups like the KKK, terrorized, and killed blacks in an attempt to keep them from obtaining justice or equality.In fact, between 1880 and 1951, the Tuskegee Institute recorded 3,437 lynchings of African-Americans. It was into this reality that Martin Luther King was born, and it was this world that he sought to, and succeeded in changing.The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 finally ended the legal sanctions, but the gap in opportunity, and discrimination still continued. Time, and the work of so many people have brought our country closer to King’s dream, yet some of the legacies still remain.

It was into that present day America that last night Obama stepped on to a stage in Chicago, with his wife and his two young daughters and before a crowd of 125,000 thanked all America for making him The president-elect. As the cameras paned out across the tens of thousands of faces, Kings “Dream” seemed in part realized. The sea of faces really did look like America. And I have to say as a “White American” it made me proud.

America is a great place, because we have learned from,our past, and while still flawed we took another important step at building a more perfect union.

Tags: America, Obama