Harlem knows how change can happen

Up in Harlem, on the boulevard named for Malcolm X, stands the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and it was to its Langston Hughes Auditorium, named for the great black poet, that I went Tuesday, notebook in hand, to interview History and marvel at what it had done.

Charlie Rangel was wondering the same thing. He is the congressman from Harlem and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, a Korean War veteran, tough as the nearby streets and vaccinated against disappointment by life itself. He mounted the stage and, in a voice perilously close to cracking, said, "I never thought I'd see my country take the children of slaves and make one of them the leader of the free world."

Of course, Barack Obama is not a descendant of slaves - but that is hardly the point. The point instead is that he would have been a slave himself in another era, denied the right to vote in another, and then schooled separately and inferiorly and then humiliated and treated with contempt so routinely that the white world would hardly have noticed.

During the presidency of Herbert Hoover, Congress appropriated funds for the mothers of soldiers killed in World War I to go to Europe to visit their graves. The government divided the women by race. "White mothers sailed to Europe in style while black mothers whose sons had been killed in their country's service were assigned to 'cattle ships.'" This is from William E. Leuchtenburg's forthcoming "Herbert Hoover."

If you read history, you come across these ugly episodes all the time. Racism in America was an insufferable ordinariness, a daily slap in the face, thousands of cuts and abrasions and an attempt to crush the spirit.

Harlem knows all about that. It is the capital of black America. The man up on the stage, Rangel, is the lineal-political descendant of Adam Clayton Powell, the first black congressman from New York. Powell, too, now has a street named for him.

In 1967, Powell was expelled from Congress for corruption. By then, his brilliance and fervor had turned to anger and entitlement - a mixture made toxic by the color of his skin. When voters returned him to office nevertheless, I went to his headquarters in Harlem and he said "Keep the faith, baby" and gloried in a sweet vindication. By 1970 he had lost his seat (to Rangel) and by 1972 he was dead, only 63, a tall man brought low by a refusal to stoop.

The crowd in the Langston Hughes Auditorium was slow to warm up. They had been given noisemakers, but maybe the polls were wrong. Maybe the election would be stolen. But then, the states started to fall in line: New Jersey, Maine, Delaware, Illinois. A whoop and some hollering for each. But these were all expected to go for Obama.

Pennsylvania fell with a thud. On the large TV screen on the stage, it crashed to the ground at precisely 8:39 CNN time. It set off an explosion that rolled out onto Malcolm X Boulevard and then, in a block or two, it seemed to settle down and then it stilled. Out on the boulevard, youths hung out and others strolled (it was balmy) and it seemed like nothing had happened. But it had - irrevocably. History was out in the street, invisible but powerful, and it would, you'll see, improve lives the way it had once ruined them. Change: It can happen.

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group