The American Saga of Senator Barack Obama & the Reverend Jeremiah Wright (8)

by RLee Cook

For the rest of us left standing with the stain of this guilt of complicity after all the exceptions have been admitted, has our complicity ultimately marked us indelibly as advocates and enablers of discrimination and prejudice? Does our cowardice as individuals or lack of pristine ethics reflect the ultimate truth of our souls? Do these conditions that we have succumbed to as individuals reflect accurately the experiences of the vast majority of Americans and the true conscience of America?

In the nation’s only recently ended civil rights era of the 1950’s and 1960’s, did the majority of southern whites in key battlegrounds of Birmingham Alabama, Greensboro North Carolina, Atlanta Georgia, and delta towns in Mississippi- indeed, did even a significant plurality in any of the segregated south- outwardly support the struggle of the indigenous blacks and their northern white liberal allies who flooded the region leading the charge for change and for freedom? Did they ever pour from their churches, fraternal organs and clubs and homes to enthusiastically greet or warmly embrace the civil rights liberators; or alternately did native whites abandon the south by the thousands in moral revulsion at the abhorrent display of violent resistance to the granting of true American rights and freedoms to its black citizens? And while there were clearly some exceptions, the majority of southern whites-- history conclusively affirms-- definitively did not.

(However, black southerners in spite of the bloody success of the civil rights effort, abandoned the region yet again in a spasm of migration by the hundreds of thousands.)

Yet while their voices were largely muted in the public square and their actions appeared feeble when contrasted against the face of the virulent segregationist reaction, there was at least a stubborn white plurality of citizens nonetheless who did not seek to impeach President Lyndon B. Johnson and other southern political leaders who along with progressive politicians in the rest of the nation marshaled the landmark reforms through congress which produced the conditions black Americans in particular, and other minority interest groups enjoy today.

And it is clear now, that this same southern white constituency which once too was suspect and considered complicit supported at least benignly the raft of enfranchising reforms which ended segregation in the 1960’s making possible today the historic candidacy of Barack Obama which now so consumes our nation in debate.

And have those who now live in harmony with this new political dispensation of the current age -those silent, plurality whites from the old segregated backward time yet alive---simply acquiesced again; or
does the era we all enjoy today actually reflect what they too, deeply yearned for as well as Dr . King and other more progressive Americans?

Could not they too, despite their seeming complicity with segregation privately, secretly, have dreamed as well, LBJ and JFK and MLK’s dream for a Great Society or Barack Obama’s “More Perfect Union”? The answer to that question is as apparent as the challenge of today which looms before us. And the answer is yes, yes indeed, they could have.

For probably when silent plurality whites looked themselves in their bathroom mirrors as well as the questioning faces of their troubled children five decades ago, they also saw a mirror into their own souls, saw that what yearned there deep inside, was what yearned in the hearts of people in the streets everywhere around them throughout our land.

However much black Americans in general, from the old as well as the new generations, may remain unsure about the conscience of white America toward our ultimate plight, Barack Obama’s truly impressive run for the American presidency is compelling evidence that cannot be ignored. His run challenges all Americans to look within themselves once again and define once again what kind of
Americans we individually and collectively truly are, what kind of America we truly want our nation and society to become.

He cannot do it alone for us, anymore than the founding fathers, or Abraham Lincoln, or Frederick Douglass or MLK, JFK, or LBJ, could. Only you and I can create a more perfect America. And either we shall rise to the compelling challenge of this singular historical moment as did preceding generations of Americans in similar circumstances and usher in a new era of American idealism or history will record that we came up short.

As Senator Barack Hussein Obama asserted in the concluding lines of his great speech, “We do have a choice, in America”.

May 1, 2008, Boston, MA