GOP Uncle Tom Votes Obama to Counter Injustice

"It is an out-and-out damnable outrage!" a well-known Senator from Tennessee exclaimed upon learning no less than the President of the United States had for the first time in the nation's history invited a Negro to dine with him at the White House. It's was President Teddy Roosevelt's first crime. "Now that Roosevelt has eaten with that nigger [Booker T.] Washington," bellowed one-hot-tempered Senator from South Carolina, "we shall have to kill a thousand niggers to get them back in their places."

Has it only been a hundred years since these reliably racist sentiments were uttered,--a little more than a hundred years since so many numbers of the world's greatest deliberative body with clenched fists denounced a President who saw himself as standing between the colored race and their permanent and hopeless debasement as a permanent underclass even though, under law, they had the same rights as every other citizen. Imagine a Senator today saying on Fox News in front of the klieg lights it constituted the most damnable outrage for a once-proud Democratic Party to nominate a nigger to dine for four years at the White House, much less one evening.

If we are to take literally the findings of our pollsters, we've come a long way baby. No, we haven't all taken to puffing Virginia Slims. But all the polls show with a substantial lead over John McCain in several key states. No black pol in the history of American politics has enjoyed such a meteoric rise among whites as Obama. After all, blacks college graduates are still men and women, in executive, administrative an managerial jobs, who earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by white male grads.

On paper, there is no argument. As recently as 1993, salaried black college grads earned a median salary of $30,910, compared with $18,620 for black high school grads. Now make that first number $37,490 for the college grad and $22,370 for the high school grad, and you have the findings of the 1993 Census Bureau. What is more, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal labor records, black workers were the only group to experience a net loss of jobs during the 1900-1991 recession.

But a hundred years ago, the Scimitar, Memphis, Tennessee, had this to say about the invitation of a man who was lauded by many in his time as a black George Washington, "The most damnable outrage which has been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States was committed yesterday by the President, when he invited a nigger to dine with him at the White House. Coarse-fibered men could not understand the concerns of the South; one editorial suggested at one stroke he had destroyed respect for him.

The fact that a black man looks increasingly likely to win the presidency later this year is a nightmarish testimony of the implacable hatred people of goodwill have had to overcome.

I have a great-great aunt who turned one hundred years old last month. I knew it, but I didn't realize the significance of it until I began writing this. She's still with us, and yet she was also alive when the very thought of a black man even dining in the White House was repulsive to millions in this land. And they weren't a silent majority.

My entire life I've had to listen to people trying to tell me I'm just a white man in brown skin. Not those exact words. Well, more or less. I did vote for Bush in each of the last two elections. Until recently, I was an avid listener of Rush Limbaugh's. And I did my small part to put the Republi-spends in power in the 1994 Contract with America crusade. I've always broken ranks.

Yet I also attended the Million Man March in October, 1995, on the Mall in Washington.That incident coincided with a time in which I was rebelling against the GOP's cutbacks in affirmative action. (I'm somewhat of a contradiction).

However, in my heart I cannot forget that it says something that I'm alive now, writing this, as so many black bloodlines perished in the Middle Passage, and also during that time between the Reconstruction and the Great Migration when the phenomenon of we sometimes call "strange fruit"--lynching black men--adorned trees, when Southern whites dispensed, before they were a staple of black diets, "hot wings"--turnin' niggers to angels.

So I come from survival stock. And though I find myself in the Thomas Sowell/Clarence Thomas/Condi Rice school of thought more often than I like to admit, the blood-soaked path my folk have traversed to get to this moment is never far from my mind. I have a living duty to cherish those martyrs in my heart, and the memory of those unknown lynched-ones and murdered great ones whose renown I will not willingly let die.