As a child, "colored" was the polite word to distinguish a darker-skinned person - later it was "negro," then "black" and now "African-American."
I always felt sick and horrified when a movie would come on with a racially prejudiced southern sheriff in a similar community. On TV, when I saw the black children trying to go to integrated southern schools being harassed, yelled at, etc., I cringed and felt like crying, craving things to be different. There was a lunch counter in the front of my hometown Terre Haute, Indiana's dime store for whites only and the one for blacks was in the back of the store. I remember my sense of injustice overwhelming me as I looked at this in unbelief. There was a day when my grandfather, whom I cherished, told me a certain swimming pool we were driving by was called the "inkpot" because only negroes swam there. When in high school, a white girl and black boy were caught making out in a car, the scandal flew around the town.With these personal shocks of injustice and other well-publicized national incidents part of my growing up, being born in 1941, I made a permanent choice to believe the color of people's skin was no basis for judgment of character. I did not look for opportunities to state my opinion but when situations arose, I was not bashful about stating how I felt. As Martin Luther King, and many groups made things happen, I was overjoyed to see radical changes take place.
I believe many white people have felt similarly to me in those growing years. Many have always seen black people as equals, even though we have not performed wonderful, difference-making actions that have made an obvious difference. On the other side, it was often impossible for some black people to believe there were people like me. On a seven-week Christian study tour of Europe in 1966 of 12 countries (four communist ones), 21 of us were trying to determine if Christians and communists should dialogue.
One participant was Eloise, a 30-some-year-old black social worker who had ridden on the freedom buses. She was something else - intelligent, friendly, self-assured. She had requested private rooms on the trip, when possible, but when this could not happen, I was often her roommate. Near the end of the trip - I remember the basement hotel room we were in exactly, in Vienna, Austria - I said something to Eloise about her being my friend. The change in her was something to behold. She looked at me and said slowly and distinctly, "No white person can ever be my friend!" and she left the room. I cried myself to sleep, which is not like me at all. That was it. We continued the trip talking to each other, etc. But, inside, I had dramatically learned that the damage done to even the best of many black people had been so devastating that they felt unable to heal the feeling of racism toward whites.
I voted for McCain, but I felt overjoyed with the significance of having an African-American running for president. Whether he won or not could not eliminate what he had already shown could be done. In the last few months, I tried to Google Eloise without much success. I wanted to say, "Eloise, can we be friends now?"
Last night, feeling delight in watching both whites and blacks joyously celebrating Obama's victory, I felt excitement over this demonstration that racism is over. Those white people or black people who are still stuck in the pain of those old times must let go and let America work.
