WE AIN’T WHAT WE WAS

My eyes filled with tears last Tuesday evening when presidential candidate Barack Obama won more than 270 electoral college votes to become our first black president elect. What an historic event. Thank God we live in the age of television because millions, maybe billions, of people throughout the world could see blacks and whites, young and old, people of every racial and ethnic heritage, standing together, holding hands, weeping and cheering in Grant Park, Chicago, and Times Square in New York City, in capital cities of our five continents and in millions of households throughout the nation.

That night the United States of America regained a large measure of its prestige and nobility in the world.

It is true that this event happened because of Barack Obama and his staff and their superb organizational skills. It happened because Obama had a superb intellect and unique temperament. He was not flustered or bested in the debates with Senator Hillary Clinton or Senator John McCain.

But it happened also because of the Democratic Party. From senators and governors to precinct committee persons and volunteers, the Democratic party worked as a team. No one worked harder for his election than Hillary Clinton after he defeated her.

It happened because thousands of others, many of whom are now dead, laid the groundwork. I urge my readers to read David Halberstam’s monumental book The Children, which details how James Lawson from Baldwin Wallace College, after serving prison time for refusing to register for the Vietnam War, went to India to study the non-violent techniques of Gandhi. He then returned to the USA and taught these techniques to black college students who endured insults, curses and threats to their lives as they tried to integrate the lunch counters of Nashville, Tenn.

Many of these young people became Freedom Riders who rode two buses into various cities of the South to test the integration waters. They were not to take any weapons or clubs with them. At various bus stops they were dragged off the buses and beaten while the police authorities looked on. One of those riders was John Lewis, now a U. S. Congressman, who was seriously beaten and nearly lost his life.

It happened also because many white Protestant ministers preached against the sin of segregation. There were some Catholic priests also who preached against the treatment of black citizens, like Father Vincent P. Haas of the diocese of Cleveland. Haas was the first priest in our diocese to join the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was one of the founders of the Catholic Interracial Council and did much to promote racial peace during the Hough riots of the 1960s.

Nor should we forget the courageous and untiring work of Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. When the internationally acclaimed opera singer Marian Anderson was denied permission to sing at Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution because she was black, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her daily column “My Day” that she was resigning from the Daughters of the American Revolution. She arranged for Marian Anderson to sing at the base of the Lincoln Memorial. Her beautiful voice was broadcast into millions of homes that Easter Sunday of 1939 and brought national attention to the issue of civil rights.

Yes, all of these events brought the great victory of November 4, 2008. We have made a lot of progress since the days of the lynchings, the discrimination, the whips, the hoses, the police dogs but we still have a long way to go.

In a 1959 speech the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted this prayer from a preacher who had once been a slave. “Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”

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