I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this is a good Bob Herbert column. He gives a shout-out not just to the fact that a black man won the Democratic presidential nomination—a truly historic moment in our nation’s history—but he also acknowledged Hillary’s historic moments as well.
Good for him.
Kennedy had been accused of dreaming when he said in the early 1960s that a black person could get elected president in the next 40 years.
The fact that even a dreamer could imagine nothing shorter than a 40-year timeline gives us a glimpse of the nightmarish depths of racial oppression that people of goodwill have had to fight.
The United States in 1968 (the same year in which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated) was a stunningly different place from the country we know now, so different that most of today’s young people would have trouble imagining it. The notion in ’68 that a black person — or a woman — might have a serious shot at the presidency would have been widely viewed as lunacy.
Don’t forget, until about 1967, miscegenation laws were on the books in 16 states, including the one I now call home.
I have no intention of voting for Obama, but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize how great this nation is. Europe talks the talk, but we walk the walk. In forty years, we changed the way we think to the point where a black presidential candidate is not only no longer unthinkable, but the reality.