ELECTION RESULTS

I sit here tonight on the cusp of one of the most momentous events of my lifetime contemplating those who are not alive to see Americans voting for Barack Obama.

On April 4, 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, depriving the world of one of the greatest moral authorities of the twentieth century. He was thirty-nine. King had achieved so much at such a young age that it is hard to believe that he has been gone longer than the brief time he spent on this earth. He spoke out not only on segregation and racism against African Americans, but about many other issues of the day, from police brutality and labor strikes to the Vietnam War. Given the current state of the world, we would all benefit from hearing Martin's voice, if only he were alive today. . . .

That paragraph is from “What Would Martin Say?” by Clarence B. Jones. Stanford Professor Jones was Rev. King’s personal attorney who brought the Letter From The Birmingham Jail out of the Birmingham jail. In this book Prof. Jones considers what Dr. King would say about the serious issues of today: Islamic terrorism, the war in Iraq, reparations for slavery, illegal immigration. I’m sure Barack Obama would like to know.

Civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman disappeared at approximately 10:00 p.m., Sunday, June 21, 1964. The next day their burned-out station wagon was found in a swamp; their bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Schwerner was 25 years old; Chaney and Goodman were only 21. Goodman had been in Mississippi only one day before he was kidnapped and murdered. If only those boys could have known that their sacrifice would make it possible for a black man to be a serious candidate for the highest office in the country.

Medgar Evers, state field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), became one of the first martyrs of the civil rights movement when he was shot in the back in his driveway in June, 1963. His death prompted President John Kennedy to ask Congress for a comprehensive civil-rights bill, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the next year.

Viola Liuzzo was a white 39 year old Detroit mother of five stirred to participate in the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march. I can’t imagine how frightened she was being chased down an unfamiliar highway in Lownes County, Alabama, by Klansmen bent on killing her for giving rides to local marchers. Two shots through the car window killed her immediately. Many credit this heinous act with catapaulting the Voting Rights Act into law.

Medgar Evers children got to watch him die. Now I hope they and Viola Liuzzo’s children will watch a black man become president.

Other people were not directly on the civil rights front lines, but were just as committed. Buelah Horton, a Howard University nursing graduate, was my mother’s friend and colleague. Her son Douglas and I shared the same birth day and various family celebrations. If only Buelah and Douglas could have lived to see this day.

Who will you be thinking of when the election results are in?