Wishing my parents could see this American evolution

Joye Brown

November 5, 2008

I wish Ma and Daddy were alive today.

They'd weep at the news that a man of African blood had been elected president. They'd stand proud that the country's new first family is an American family much like our own.

During the 1960s, my parents' generation carried the burden of fighting inequality, while prepping their children to reach beyond it.

Today, my parents would be celebrating a nation that voted to make Barack Obama president; because voters, white and black, believed a young, slender man with brown skin the best candidate for the job.

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They would use Obama's election as a lesson for their seven grandchildren. A challenge for them to reach even higher, because, as of today, the bar has been set higher for every American.

My mother and father, who would be in their 80s today, never once told us what we, as black children, couldn't do. On the contrary, they took pride in pushing whatever obstacles they could from our path.

My mother's mother worked as a maid in Richmond to a Virginia attorney general. There's a photograph of the man's daughter, smiling, as Grandma, who's also smiling, in her maid's uniform, holds the train of her wedding dress.

My father's family hailed from the Blue Ridge mountains in the western part of Virginia. Census records list generations of my ancestors in that region as "mulattos." The word was long considered a slur. Today, my own mixed-race children, like the nation's president-elect, celebrate their heritage.

The lines of American history that run through my family say we're descended from "free issue," the freeborn, mixed-race children of black slaves and white masters.

I knew that from family stories. Ancestry.com took me even farther, leading me to a property list of 27 slaves, identified only by gender and age. One or more of the women on the list likely are my ancestors. There are Indian ancestors, too.

In Virginia, like all of the South during the years of Jim Crow, the social lines were crystal, and sometimes dangerously, clear.

Segregation was in full swing during the mid-1920s, when my parents were born.

They sat on the back of the bus.

But grew up to fight it.

They went to separate and unequal schools.

And grew to fight those, too.

I once saw a "Colored" sign over a water fountain in Virginia.

My parents grew up drinking from them, or choosing to go thirsty.

My father and his two brothers served in segregated units of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

How many times did they, standing tall and in full uniform, put hands over hearts for the "Pledge of Allegiance," and say the words, "With liberty and justice, for all," knowing full well that, for them, it wasn't true? Yet, all three were proud veterans who loved their country.

My parents met at Howard University (my mother was the only one of her siblings to graduate from high school). They married and settled in Washington, D.C., where they worked for the U.S. government.

When I was in the third grade, they went downtown to be part of the historic "March on Washington," not knowing whether they'd end up in jail or back home that night. The civil rights activists in my parents' generation had to be hardworking, selfless and resilient. They successfully steered a way for their children with strong hands.

A few weeks before he died, (my mom had died 20 years earlier), my dad sat down with my children for the last time. "Remember," he told my son and daughter, "you come from strong stock, strong people."

There's no straight line from my parents' Jim Crow childhoods, through their activist civil rights days, through my own childhood, straight through to yesterday's historic election. It's far more complex than that.

Yet, it's all part of the evolution of the nation's grand experiment in democracy. Yesterday was not the end of racism, or the nation's racial and ethnic divide. But a powerful blockade has been breached.

We don't know yet how Obama will govern, or whether he will be able to hold together the unprecedented coalition that propelled him into office.

But the vote wasn't just about Obama.

It was about us all. About my American family and yours.