A new morning in America

There have always been two distinct sides to my personality. One is the hard-charging, have-a-good-time, politically and socially interested, macho, sports-minded side and the other is the vulnerable, caring, emotional side when something really touches my heart. I've cried at the movies, cried watching television shows, and cried in front of the loves of my life. I had several of those emotional moments while watching Tuesday's Presidential Inauguration.

And it wasn't necessarily because Barack Obama was being sworn-in as our 44th President. I don't mean that in a disparaging way. I was impressed with Obama the first time I heard him speak at the Democratic National Convention four years ago. He's a tremendous orator, one of the best I've ever heard because he can turn a phrase like few other people can, but I don't know if he's going to be a good President or a bad one. I hope he's a good one because I supported him throughout this election cycle with my contributions of time and money and with my vote so it's always heart-warming to see your guy win and then do good too, even when you live in an area where most of your friends and neighbors voted for the other guy.

As one reporter on CNN said, this was not a transitional election, it was a transformative election. Bill Bennett, the neoconservative Republican talking-head and former Secretary of Education, when asked what he was going to do when Obama was sworn in said, "I'm going to stand up and cheer just like everyone else" because this is a seminal moment in the history of this country.

And indeed it is. The significance of this election is not that Barack Obama was elected but that a black man was elected. If the quirks of fate had been different, we could have had a black man elected even sooner. Many people believe that if Colin Powell had decided to run for the Presidency eight years ago, there's a good chance he would have been the first black man elected president. But he didn't and so that mantle will always be worn by Barack Obama.

This election is much more significant and life-changing to people of my generation than it is the younger generation and in a way, that's a good thing. The young people of today tend to be much more color-blind and gender-blind than my generation was and is. To those young people who worked and voted in this election, they weren't voting for a candidate based on skin color or gender, they were voting for who they believed would be the best president. The down side, of course, is that they are not fully aware of how improbable, even impossible this seemed just a few short years ago.

I was a 17-year-old freshman sitting in my fraternity house at the University of Arkansas on Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, when a KKK member exploded a bomb at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four little black girls and injuring more than 20 more. Those images and recollections came flooding back into my mind as I watched the Obama's two young children, Malia and Sasha, walk on stage on a brilliantly sun-splashed day while smiling ear to ear to watch their dad become President of the United States. And I couldn't help but shed a tear as I watched them while other memories of man's inhumanity to his fellow man came rushing back into my mind.

In the same year of the church bombing, the world watched Bull Connor, the Public Safety Commissioner, order the use of fire hoses, baseball bats, and police attack dogs against peaceful protest marchers on the streets of Birmingham, Ala.

I remember the "white" and "colored" water fountains that could be found in every town in the south. I remember black employees being required to enter their place of work through the back door instead of the front door that could only be used by the white employees. I remember blacks being forced to sit at the back of the bus and I remember separate train cars for black and white passengers. I remember that most hotels and restaurants were for whites only. I remember miscegenation laws that banned interracial marriage, cohabitation and sex. From 1913 to 1948, 30 of the 48 states had them and it wasn't until the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision in 1967 that struck down these laws as being unconstitutional that the laws were repealed. At the time, 16 states still had them.

I remember state constitutions that defined a black person as being "less than human" and other state documents that placed the value of a black person at 3 cents.

And the last lynching of a black man happened just 28 years ago, in 1981, when two KKK members hung a 19-year-old black man in Mobile, Ala.

Yes, we've traveled a great distance in my lifetime when it comes to being our brother's keeper and this past Tuesday, we came one step closer to achieving Martin Luther King's vision of America:

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

We're not there yet but we're closer than we've ever been.

It won't be long before all the old bigots die off; the bigots raised in my generation in a segregated and sexist society who believed everyone to be inferior to them. And they will be replaced by a brand-new generation of Americans who will see the bad and good in people not because of their skin color, ethnicity, race, religion or gender, but by their words and their actions only.

And that will be a good thing.