What you wish for
“Barack Obama’s candidacy was the Clintons’ worst nightmare. They had dreamed of the day when an African-American could be elected president. But they never anticipated it would happen on their watch and were utterly confounded.”— CARL BERNSTEIN, the author of “A Woman in Charge”, in the New York Times Op Ed “Low Riders”, 6/8/08
Reading this comment by a former Watergate reporting hero and recent biographer of Hillary Clinton took me back to the late summer of 1965, beginning my sophomore year in college, during the heart of the civil rights movement. In April, I had been one of fourteen students – seven black, seven white – who had attempted to desegregate the seven local Winfield, Kansas barbershops on a sunny Saturday morning.
It was my first civil rights activism, if you don’t count my speaking against my minister in 1962 for reading Uncle Remus stories (complete with Stepin Fetchit accent) to the Oklahoma white kids’ church camp in which one lone African American girl had quietly and single-handedly desegregated that little tradition.
Now I felt mainstream. I wasn’t taking the bus to Alabama to sign up Black voters, like some in my class, but I was acting locally and meaningfully. The barbershop incident had sparked a furor in the town of 10,000 and had split the mostly white town right down the middle – even the Methodist church in which I was student minister. After initial resistance, the barbers did, gradually over years, begin cutting everyone’s hair.
And it had highlighted other, closer racism within our own church-related college including an unstated policy of segregated dorm rooms. So when, in May, the Dean posted a signup sheet for students willing to room bi-racially, I was one of the first to sign it.
And I was one of the first three to be chosen, come the fall of 1965, to room bi-racially: Willie Williams, Roger Winfrey, and me. Roger was a Kansas boy and also a pre-ministerial student. Willie was from Texas, son of a sharecropper, who only had enough money for three of the four years of college (he would go on to graduate after three years).
Of the three of us only Willie and I survived the experience. Roger found it too stressful, too unreal, and eventually even left the school. But Willie and I grew to know each other very well, to share our very different childhoods, to cross the wide social divide and become genuinely warm friends.
All eyes were on us. Seriously, from a four-decade perspective it sounds silly and melodramatic, but it was quite simply revolutionary. My own grandmother denounced me. I lost my scholarship because the Tulsa racist right wing Christian who had put up the money refused to fund an integrationist. But for my Dad and an understanding banker in Oxford, I would not have been able to pay for my senior year – the college financial head would not sign off on a student loan.
But in all of it, the ring of truth in the above Carl Bernstein comment is my memory of my first reaction when I was told I had been selected to desegregate Southwestern College student housing. “Oh, my god.” I had no idea it would be me. An impulse of right thinking had prompted me to sign up for desegregated dorm living. Why wouldn’t I sign up? But I do remember that first thought, that first moment when it actually was about to alter the course of my own life.
I know, just a little bit, what the Clintons might be feeling. But I also know that my nine months with Willie Williams was a profound experience and a most healing one. And I know the same will be true for America when Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, 2009.
Labels: Clinton, Obama, President, racism
posted by DanZ @ 11:37 AM
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