DNC-Day 3

I have learned that time helps us measure the meaning of events. I often ask myself whether a song or a speech or a book will be remembered in ten years. It helps me know whether I’m dealing with something which, if not quite eternal in value, at least transcends the moment, and perhaps the immediate era.

It is easy to miss the lasting meaning of last night at the Democratic National Convention. Bill Clinton gave a fine speech and showed uncharacteristic humility, but we will not likely remember his words a decade from now. Nor will we recall the speech of Joe Biden, who seemed to wrestle with the text prepared for him but who gave the convention its best Freudian slip when he merged Bush and McCain into “George McCain.”

No, the significance of last night—and I hope we are all big hearted enough to acknowledge it—is that a black man became the nominee of his party for president of the United States. I lay this alongside the U.S. House of Representatives’ recent apology for slavery and I am grateful that one of our great national sins is being expunged through deed and not just sentiment.

It was in 1619, a year before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, that twenty black men and women were offloaded at Jamestown, Virginia, in exchange for food and tobacco. They were supposed to be indentured servants but the recent decision at Jamestown to attempt economic salvation by tobacco changed all that. As I wrote in Then Darkness Fled, my brief life of Booker T. Washington:

So began the horrors that were American slavery. So began the kidnappings and betrayals and murders in Africa. So began the dreaded Middle Passage across the Atlantic with its suffocating coffin-like confines, its disease and stench and madness and death. So began the screaming and the haunting clanking of chains and the sound of dead black bodies splashing into mid-ocean with such frequency that even the sharks learned to follow ships departing the coast of Africa. So began the markets and the humiliating inspections and the whippings. So began the dehumanizing of both black and white and the woven fabric of lies required to protect the illusion of Christian civilization.



What we now know, of course, is that the horrors of this practice spilled out into our land, ripped us asunder in the bloodiest war of our history, and left stains on the souls of generations yet unborn. Even half a century after this war of brothers, Americans heard a racist president, Woodrow Wilson, extol the virtues of a film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan—in the epic Birth of a Nation—and thus emboldened that Klan to march down the streets of our capitol en masse on more than one occasion.
It was only the beginning of a renewed season of demonic rage. There would be the thousands lynched in a South aflame and leaders assassinated by the most despicable conspiracies. And when civil rights were assured by our courts, we hoped that an even higher Court would assure a change in men’s heart. It has taken time and it is not yet complete, but perhaps a new day is now upon us.

I watched last night as Barack Obama was nominated. The camera of the network I was watching kept cutting to an older black woman, gray hair gracing her thick locks, who wept with near disbelief as a man of her race stepped unmolested toward the presidency of her country. I thought of what she might know that I did not. I wondered if she could name relatives killed by rage-blinded mobs or what she might have been denied in her life because of her color. And now a man of that color might rule her land. I shared her joy even if I could not fully share her understanding of the meaning of that moment.

Barack Obama is not my candidate and I do not share most of his political principles. But Barack Obama is my fellow countryman and I refuse to let politics keep me from pride and gratitude that a black man who grew up in a family often on food stamps has now graduated from some of the great universities in our land, served in the nation’s senate, and is a nominee for President of the United States. Hopefully, a bit more of our national curse is broken this day.

God, how I love this country.