The Path to Obama

During last Tuesday's inaugural address, while watching a black man become the most powerful person in the world, these reflections came to mind.

I recalled the day during the Second World War when a prominent black West Indies cricketer who was part of the crew of a British aircraft carrier (no doubt assigned to mess duty) came to play at Brockton Point in Vancouver. He was asked to change clothes in a separate room.

I remembered the downtown Vancouver hotels that wouldn't take the great Nat "King" Cole as a guest.

Breaking down baseball's bigotry

I thought of Jackie Robinson, in 1946 the first black in "organized" baseball and who was the most valuable player in the International League in that, his rookie year. I thought of the wonderful story of Robinson, about to play his first major league game in Ebbets Field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, kissing his wife Rachel goodbye and telling her, "You'll recognize me out on the field... I'll be wearing number 42!"

And I remember the other aging black stars of the Negro Leagues who followed Robinson: Sam Jethroe, Luke Easter, Larry Doby, Monte Irvin and the amazing Leroy "Satchel" Paige, who was a major league "rookie" at 42 went on to play professional baseball well into his 50s. And I recall how our math teacher, Russ Robinson, let us listen to the 1948 World Series game where Paige came into pitch for the Cleveland Indians.

I thought, as the president spoke, of how sports, especially team sports look today compared to when their teams were made up of whites only. I asked myself just how good were Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Ted Williams, Stan Musial and the like when they never had to face the likes of a Paige in his prime?

I looked back with admiration for Willie Mays, Roy Campanella, Joe Morgan, Bob Gibson, Roberto Clemente, Ozzie Smith and so many other blacks who transformed baseball to what it is today.

And, of course, I thought of Tiger Woods.

Pushing open school doors

The social issue of my early adulthood was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the 1954 case where the Supreme Court of the United States banned segregation in U.S. schools. This segued into the case of Autherine Lucy, a plucky young black woman who stared down the bigots of Alabama, including Governor George Wallace, and enrolled in The University of Alabama; then there were the nine black youngsters who, in 1957, walked to school in Little Rock Arkansas past jeering white parents and became the first black students at Central High School. I well remembered on Oct. 1, 1962, after riots leaving two dead and 48 injured, James Meredith became the first black student at the University of Mississippi, "Ole Miss."

I thought of the '60s and the freedom fighters who toured the South to help blacks to register to vote and to be able to eat in any restaurant they wished; of Thursday, Dec. 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give her seat up to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, setting up a 381 day black boycott which inspired the Civil Rights movement and led to the Supreme Court's ruling in November 1956 that segregation on transportation was unconstitutional.

Pouring out artistic blessings

Then jazz, the unique cultural present America has given the world came to mind and I thought of those musicians I admired so much -- Canada's Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thomas "Fats" Waller, Duke Ellington and so many other brilliant artists.

I pondered the Benny Goodman Quartet. In the mid '30s, Goodman hired two blacks, pianist Teddy Wilson and vibes pioneer Lionel Hampton. This wasn't the first time blacks and whites had played together but it was the most important moment, musically and socially. Of this Lionel Hampton said, "As far as I'm concerned, what he [Goodman] did in those days -- and they were hard days, in 1937 -- made it possible for Negroes to have their chance in baseball and other fields."

Then there is the story of the great black singer Marian Anderson. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused permission for Anderson to sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall. The District of Columbia Board of Education declined a request to use the auditorium of a white public high school. As a result of the ensuing furor, thousands of DAR members, including then first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, resigned.

Finally, it was arranged that she would hold a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the same steps where last Tuesday people crowded to hear the president. On Easter Sunday, 1939 Marian Anderson, in the shadow of the memorial to the "Great Emancipator," sang to a crowd of more than 75,000 of all colors, and a national radio audience of millions.

'I have a dream...'

And who could not be reminded of Martin Luther King, again with Lincoln looking down upon him at his memorial, who, on August 28, 1963 ended his great "I have a dream" speech with these stirring words: "When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"

As the president spoke, my thoughts went to November 2007 when Wendy and I were in Dakar, Senegal, where we saw, in horror, a horror that literally took the breath away, the jails black slaves were stuffed into in while they awaited the slaving boats where they were then chained together, 10 to the space of one. Being chained meant that if an anti-slaver ship came near, it was easy to dump the cargo overboard; not only was it easier, there would be no visual proof to be concerned with.

We saw the jails on the other shore in Recife, Brazil, where perhaps half of those enslaved survived to meet their new masters. We saw the spot in Recife where the auctions of fellow human beings took place.

Chest thumping or heartfelt?

As I listened to the new American president, nothing struck me so hard as did his observation that a son of a man who "less than 60 years ago, might not have been served at a local restaurant, [could] now stand before you to take a most sacred oath."

But wasn't it, after all, just political theatre where commentators pointed out that the ceremony was running late? Just another chest thumping American extravaganza starring all the beautiful people being watched by the masses? Did it really have any more meaning than when George W. Bush or Bill Clinton were sworn in? After all, there was no policy laid out, no promises of specific things, nothing concrete to go on.

All President Obama gave to the hundreds of millions who watched the inauguration speech was what Franklin Roosevelt gave on his inauguration on March 4, 1933... hope. Hope. Hope that America would recover its moral balance and return to justifiable leadership on the world stage; hope that America, wounded fiscally and morally, still had life and could recover.

Without hope, there is no foundation to build upon. But a nation with hope in its heart, combined with a president whose leadership justifies that hope, can make those dreams come true.

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