His victory takes me back to the first history I ever knew

History, on the scale and magnitude of this week’s U.S. presidential election, has a way of evoking other history.

Such was the case as I sat listening to President-elect Barack Obama’s acceptance speech early Wednesday morning, There was the rush of euphoria and anticipation. And with it, memory.

It had to do with a nine-month span between September 1967 and June 1968. Little more than a blink from an adult’s perspective. But a vast continent of time to a child. My first era.

It was the year I started first grade. By day, I simmered with excitement, unable to satisfy my appetite for learning.

At night, I directed my eagerness toward the evening news. I kept a kind of silent vigil, waiting for the nightly Vietnam War casualty count to appear over the shoulder of CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. American service men and women killed. Americans wounded.

January ushered in what would prove to be a pivotal year for America –1968. It began with the Tet offensive. Televised reports from Vietnam grew more urgent and stirring. Dan Rather from the front line. The rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire. Sweeping shots of verdant rice paddies. A faceless enemy seeming to have no beginning and no end.

I remember a growing, vague concern for what it meant for America to win or lose a war. While nobody from my immediate family served in the war, I sensed the implications.

One day, I watched a mother run screaming from her house, having just learned that her son had been killed in combat. I recall the joyful relief of a family hanging a Welcome Home Joe banner on the front porch railing.

I took refuge in the reassuring image and sound of Dr. Martin Luther King. A preacher unlike any I had known. My first glimpse of human dignity under fire.

Mr. Obama’s acceptance speech echoed the final words of Dr. King. “I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

Then Dr. King’s assassination. Bells tolling. Adults talking in hushed tones. A looming darkness.

One day, my mother pulled up to a stop sign. In front, and on either side of the car, a fight erupted. Black against white. Young men bouncing off the hood and front windshield of our Plymouth Valiant.

More violence followed. Sirens blaring into the night. The unforgettable sight, sound and smell of houses burning. Cannon-like explosions. A roar that grew as wood-framed homes gave fuel to the rage burning all around my grandmother’s Beltzhoover neighborhood.

And in the darkness, light.

The emerging face and presence of Robert Kennedy. Young. Charismatic.

Large, enthusiastic crowds rallying. My new vigil, waiting for the brief glimpse of the candidate on the same evening news. Kennedy gaining delegates and momentum. A victory speech from California. Dreamland. And then, abruptly, chaos again. Another assassination. Unspeakable grief.

The day after this year’s election, my mother shared with me her profound sense of joy — elation, really — as she watched President-elect Obama take the stage in Chicago. Not joy despite all she has witnessed and experienced, but because of it. A woman undeterred by the prejudice of others who emerged from the same fires suspicious, fearful and small.

How grateful I am that through that strife, I was entrusted to parents and a grandmother who never succumbed to the easy temptation of hate. Who dared to think for themselves, often against the grain of friends and relatives, faithful to the belief that one should treat others — all others — as you yourself would want to be treated.

A week ago, I found myself driving with my son and one of his classmates through that same Beltzhoover neighborhood on our way to a skating park. He wanted to see where I had spent so much of my childhood.

As we stopped in front of the weed-covered lot that was once my grandmother’s home, the boys fell silent.

“What happened?” one of them asked.

In other words, how could something as strong and essential as a home disappear? Slowly, their eyes adjusted to a reality far different than what they know. They could see the preponderance of vacant lots.

Maybe in a post-Obama America, we can examine more closely our assumptions about us and them, look for reasons and ways to move toward, not away from brokenness and devastation. To find in our private memory a calling to a greater public good.

First Published November 8, 2008 in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette