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A thank-you note to Middle America
Thank you Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Stokely Carmichael, Julian Bond and many other black leaders who awakened us to the need for equal opportunity for all in America. Thank you also to Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Louis Farrakhan and the Black Panthers. Though we disliked your shrill rhetoric and abhorred the violence that you preached and too often practiced, you focused our attention on America’s biggest problem of the past century.
But thank you MOST to you, middle class America, and especially to you, the Boomer Generation. For without you, without your understanding, without your willingness to support civil rights, without your acceptance of black Americans and other minorities into your communities, your neighborhoods, your places of work and worship, and, most important, into your hearts, the election of a black president would never have been possible.
When World War II ended and black veterans returned home, they hoped that their service to their nation would allow them to enjoy and participate more fully in the benefits of democracy in their own country. What they often found was the same prejudice, the same mistreatment and the same hatred that had existed for so long. The Greatest Generation had won the war, but the battle for civil rights for all would fall to the next generation. And the real battle for civil rights took place in the hearts of Middle America.
It was not an easy battle. It tested all of us in many ways. Our city councils and school boards made tough decisions that integrated our neighborhoods and schools. While some Americans participated in white-flight to stay in all white neighborhoods, much of middle class, white America accepted and supported these decisions. On a very personal level, they lived through the problems of integration and mixed neighborhoods, but stood by these tough decisions because they knew that it was the right thing to do.
In the workplace, Middle America watched as blacks were recruited, trained and promoted while deserving Middle Americans were passed over. It often did not seem fair to us, but in our hearts we knew that civil rights for all required that black Americans must have a fair share of the wealth of the nation and our personal sacrifice may require each of us to forego a promotion or a raise so that a deserving black worker would have a chance.
Like the weight of a boulder compared to that of a grain of sand, racism and discrimination for all was too big for any individual to correct. But like the many grains of sand from a beach, when placed on the scale, they can overcome the mass of a boulder. Like the grains of sand, the will of Middle Americans to overcome the injustice of racism was irresistible. In my youth, I have watched black men refused a seat at a restaurant, a ride on a bus or a decent job, but I have lived to see the present when a black man has risen to the highest office in our land.
And so I take pride in my small contribution to this change, my grain of sand placed on the scales of history and justice. And I thank you America, especially your Boomers, for adding your grains in a fight that became so broadly supported that it led to the irresistible victory for all America.
