45 years after 'dream', we wake to fierce urgency of now
On Aug. 28, 1963, a 34-year-old black preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. overcame fear and hatred and violence and jail and dogs and water hoses and nightsticks to stand in our nation's capital and tell us about his dream.
Today, 46-year-old Barack Obama is one step away from being the first black-skinned man to win the White House.
It is OK to scream, "What took us so long?" and at the same time marvel at how quickly that barrier fell.
History is a long, hard slog punctuated by fiercely urgent moments. We methodically pull bricks out of history's wall, and then seem surprised when one day the barrier topples.
When King made his "I Have a Dream" speech, the idea of a black president, or a half-black president, was ludicrous. In a nightmarish era when people were dying in the battle to get a black person to the front of a public bus, the White House seemed an unattainable dream.
In 1958, a Gallup poll showed that only 4 percent of Americans approved of whites marrying "coloreds" -- as was the case when Barack Hussein Obama Sr. of Kenya married Ann Dunham of Kansas. But the bricks were being pulled away.
Ten years later, after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage, only three out of four Americans opposed the idea. And we kept tugging at bricks. As recently as 1983, our nation was equally divided on the question of interracial marriages. Then that wall fell.
The racial wall around our appropriately named White House has had a few bricks pulled -- even if Angela Davis, Shirley Chisholm, Dick Gregory, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Carol Moseley Braun, Alan Keyes and others were never considered legitimate contenders.
We are an amazing country. Some voters who remember when black teenager Emmitt Till was murdered for having the audacity to whistle at a white woman now are hoping for a black presidential candidate to pick a white woman as his running mate.
"To see it happen is unbelievable," admits lawyer Marian McElroy, president of the Lake County NAACP. "I'm trying to soak it all in. Is it really happening?"
I was the first media person to publicly proclaim in a column on March 2, 2004, that Obama could become our first black president. But I confess that my words were more hope than prediction.
"I think a lot of us African-Americans never thought this would happen in our lifetime," admits McElroy, whose childhood took root in those turbulent years of assassination and riots.
Obama toppled another wall Tuesday, but King's dream is far from finished.
"Our day-to-day work involves discrimination," McElroy says of her post with the NAACP. "There's no letup. Every day, we get a call from someone who feels discriminated against. When you are in these trenches every day, you get discouraged and think this country can't change. But when you see Obama … you feel there can be change."
Yes, there can.
No matter what your politics, you can take pride in our nation going from separate drinking fountains to a black-skinned man nominated for president in a single lifetime.
"There is a change in this country, and we can feel good about it," McElroy says. "There is something happening here, and it's good."
On Tuesday night, a group of my suburban neighbors crowded around a television set, toasting with champagne as we watched history.
This Aug. 28, 45 years to the day Martin Luther King Jr. told the nation "I have a dream," Barack Obama will stand before the Democratic National Convention and accept his party's nomination to be the next president of the United States.
And our nation can dream of new barriers to topple.