Founders’ promise is fulfilled.

21Jan09

A family friend of mine (and my former screenwriting mentor,) Emory Holmes II, was published on the front page of the Los Angeles Daily News on Inauguration Day.  Read the absolutely brilliant essay below:

Today, when I awake, the routine troubles of my life will greet me with customary fury as they have as long as I can remember; and the media will report on the grander troubles of humankind, proliferating like a cancer around the globe as they have for centuries. I’ll still have to find a way to deal with all that.

But I also know that today, in my 61st year, having been born under segregation in Nashville, I will sit in my living room here in my adopted hometown of Pacoima, and I will see unfolding around me in every direction, “from sea to shining sea,” an America never before revealed in the full splendor of its promise and possibility.

Today, as sunlight spreads across the frosted rooftops of our nation, I will watch – with expectation and humility – the pageantry and drama of Barack Obama’s inauguration. And as that singular and ineffable moment plays out, I will be a living witness to a principle-affirming, liberating and transforming fact of history being made – there in Washington, back here on the West Coast, and resounding in every American home.

I know this because the events unfolding in our lives today will affirm, in writing, in flesh and in fact, that now and for all time, there should be no bar to human potential for any American, no matter their gender, race or station; and that America, for all its limitations and failures, is still a land of epic ideas and achievements, and of unimaginable possibility.

Until today, this reality was never fully verifiable.  It certainly wasn’t in 1959, when my parents moved across the tracks from east to west Pacoima. It didn’t matter that my mother was a teacher and my father a decorated World War II vet, or that he was now a senior research scientist with the Rand Corp. Our white neighbors painted messages on our walls reading: “Black Plague, Don’t Let It Spread.” They burned crosses on our lawn and waged a yearlong campaign of terror and harassment against us.

In 1960, my parents sued our neighbors in state court and won the first successful anti-discrimination suit for fair housing in San Fernando Valley history. Over time, we became friends with some of our former enemies, and my father, a living embodiment of the dreams they tried to deny him, chose to forbear, though he never forgave the indignities visited upon his home in the name of American liberties he had pledged his entire life to preserve.

I will imagine my father today, not in heaven where he went in 1995, but here in this perfect home he made on Earth, sitting by the fire with my sweet mother, stroking his trimmed white beard, an unlit pipe in his mouth, pride and contentment on his face, watching President Obama on the flat-screen.

And I will recall those iconic leaders of Pacoima who he proudly worked alongside, my political and moral mentors, now gone: Margaret Avery, and Rev. Hillary and Rosa Broadous; Bishop Benjamin and Katherine Crouch; Freddie Carter, the peerless barber whose shop, Stylesville, was ground zero of African-American gossip and debate for a generation; I will think of “Mother” Ida Kinney, who died this past New Year’s Day at the age of 104, at least with the comfort that today was coming. America’s debt to them was left unpaid.

Many of those elders were Southerners, and some from my family tell a funny story about growing up in rural Alabama in 1935. They’d learned that the brilliant new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was to make a whistle-stop nearby. They threw on their best clothes and rushed down to the segregated train station. But the viewing stand designated for black folk was situated on the backside of the yard, and when Roosevelt stepped onto the platform, he could not see my mother’s half of the adoring throng. He saw only an audience of white folk. And though my mother and her cousins peered under the belly of the train, “You couldn’t see nothin’ but his feets,” one of my cousins bemoaned. “You’d be glad,” another added. “You did good to see that.”

Like the lyrics of a blues song, the story is vivid and telling and funny and painful all at once; and it is a true depiction of what it was like to exist as a Negro in 20th century America – a being without personhood, forever “invisible,” as novelist Ralph Ellison put it. The Negro had been cast in the American story as a commodity whose worth was assessed, so the Founding Fathers said, at “three-fifths of a man,” a patently grotesque and absurd standard of humanity that has, across the centuries, engendered the very cancers of injustice – moral and civic – that America was created to transcend.

Though I realize that Obama’s election will not erase the racial enmity and rank intolerance that threaten our body politic, I also know that today I stand upon elevated ground, fertile and abundant, in full view of perspectives denied my ancestors. This is ground I once thought I trod upon, but now know I never had until today – the hallowed ground of American liberty and opportunity.

With the vistas before me unobstructed, the view is sublime. Whoopi Goldberg said as much when she told her chat-mates on “The View” that the election of Obama meant she could “finally feel like I can put my bags down for the first time.” Today I witness the living confirmation of Goldberg’s bittersweet formulation. To steal a Booker T. Washington line: I can finally “cast down my bucket where I am.”

Today, I recall Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s reminder that our Founding Fathers had signed “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

That “promissory note,” which King admonished had come back to the American Negro marked “insufficient funds” – that note, bloodied and tainted by 500 years of duplicity, racial oppression and injustice – has now been formally redeemed. And it is the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama that redeems the promise of equality, freedom and human dignity that Thomas Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence.

Today, I’m seeing the grandeur and beauty of American life without a barrier, without squatting on the backside of a train yard. I am standing on my home turf, shoulder to shoulder with Americans of every age and kind. One lovely outcome of Obama’s victory is that I do not feel like running through the streets exchanging high-fives with my fellows. Now is the time to do everything in my power to ensure that the coming years point the way to American success, and with it, my own.

Today, I will applaud our new president and sip champagne with my friends, and I will sing “America the Beautiful” as clearly and sweetly as I can. And once my interlude of song and celebrations are done, I will roll up my sleeves and engage the troubles and terrors that fate now rains down on my head.

Not only because it is a matter of life and death, but because I believe – in a deeper, more spiritual and emotional way – that we are called upon now to show our resolve, our inventiveness, our courage, our resourcefulness, our efficacy, our steadfastness and the fullness of our humanity, in pursuit of the values our Constitution enshrines and now confirms – in writing, in spirit, in person and in deed – on this Inauguration Day.

Source: http://www.dailynews.com/search/ci_11494541

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