I'll be honest with you, I never thought we'd see this day in my life time. I never ever thought we'd ever have a black man be the nominee of the Democratic party in my lifetime. I knew for certain we'd never see a black man be the nominee of the Republican party and we probably never will. But I always thought that it would be another 100 years or so until we had progressed enough to vote for a black man to be our next Presidential nominee. But here we are with Barack Obama as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic party and I feel like I am not only witnessing history, I feel like I am about to burst with pride.
I was born in 1962 when the civil rights movement was just getting into gear. For the first ten years of my life I lived in the projects in Detroit. I was in the minority in my old neighborhood, there were only three white families in Smith Homes Housing Projects and ours was one of them. I grew up surrounded by black folks, my best friend was a black kid named Aaron Lewis, and we spent many hours playing, talking, eating, and in each others homes. As close as he and I were there was always something between us, and it was the unspoken knowledge that right then, and for the foreseeable future as far as we knew, that white people would always have the upper hand and would always run things.
But tonight things may finally have changed for the better.
For a country that once enslaved black folks and counted them as 3/5ths of a human to now have a black man as the presumptive nominee of one of it's major political parties is astounding. This has never happened in Great Britain, France, Brazil, or any other major democracy outside of Africa, so it's a historic day.
I started out backing Dennis Kucinich in this long Democratic party primary season and then when he started flirting with hitching his wagon to Ron Paul I dropped my support of him. Then he dropped out and I tossed my support behind John Edwards because I like his populist message, then he dropped out. At that point, frankly I was afraid to publicly back Obama for fear that I'd curse him too, but I went ahead and joined his camp and I never looked back. My first choice didn't get the nomination and neither did my second choice but I ended up backing the best choice.
And it's time for you Hillary supporters to join the rest of us in backing our presumptive nominee. No more holding out hope against hope that the super delegates will switch to her campaign. It's over. Obama won and if you care about your party, about this country, about ending the war, about ending Republican and corporate malfeasance, about keeping a woman's right to choose safe from the right wing religious nut bags, about reclaiming our civil liberties and restoring our reputation in the world, then you better get on this train. You need to support the man who history has chosen to be our first black President. Senator Obama has electrified a good portion of this nation and with your help we'll put him in the White House even if it pisses off the citizens of West Virginia (sorry June) and Kentucky.
When I was a boy people referred to blacks as n*ggers, jigaboos, monkeys, and animals. Now, 4o some odd years later people will finally call a black man "Mr. President." How effing cool is that?
