A dream comes true

I did not vote for Barack Obama. My yard sign read “McCain-Palin”. I do not agree with Obama’s agenda and I am concerned about what his proposed policies will do to the country I so love. I have rarely disagreed with a candidate as much as I disagree with President-elect Obama.

With that said, I am proud to be an American today. Within my lifetime, we have progressed from legal segregation to electing an African-American man as President. At least part of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech has come true.

In 1968, a “George Wallace for President” campaign sign loomed over our grade school playground in Chattanooga, Tenn. I didn’t understand what “segregation” meant. Little white girls didn’t have to worry about such issues.

But I remember the horror of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Some Chattanoogans, along with people in 125 other cities, rioted. The city was immediately put under a dusk-to-dawn curfew. I had forgotten about this incident until I was in Chattanooga again in the summer of 1980, when protesters rioted again over the acquittal of two Ku Klux Klan members. The eerie silence of that curfew took me back to 1968 and my uncomprehending fear. Why did I have to stay inside and why did we have to keep all the curtains closed? Why did Daddy have to stay home from work? I didn’t understand and I was frightened.

The true, shocking meaning of segregation didn’t come home to me until I worked for a school year at Longwood College, now University, in Farmville, Va.

Farmville, county seat of Prince Edward County, was at the epicenter of Virginia’s post-Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka strategy of “Massive Resistance”. Students from all-black Robert Russa Moton High in Farmville went on strike to secure a better high school building. With the help of the NAACP, they sued to end segregation. Their case, Dorothy E. Davis, et al. versus County School Board of Prince Edward County, Va., was combined with Brown.

Prince Edward County responded by shuttering its school system from 1959-64, when the threat of prison forced the County Supervisors to reopen public schools. While the schools were closed, white children took advantage of state tuition grants to attend newly-opened private schools. Black children lost five years of education.

When I lived in Farmville, Farmville High, the old all-white high school, had been turned into a storage building. My boss pointed it out to me and told me the shocking story of a county without a public school system.

And now, 40 years after Martin Luther King’s assassination, an African-American has been elected to the nation’s highest office.

Wow.

I pray that he will be a wise and just leader of our country and am committed to continual prayer for him. He’ll need it.