Illinois Favorite Son

August 28th, 2008 at 07:54am Linda Grist Cunningham

It’s a good day to be an Illinoisan. Oh, not because we are a blue state. Certainly not because our governor can govern. Not because we are smarter, wealthier, better employed. None of those things. And, not even because we had a thing to do with it. It’s good to be an Illinoisan today because when history books are written, we lived here in the land of Lincoln the day a black man was nominated for President of the United State — the first time a major political party has done so.

Barack Obama. Illinois junior senator, a man who just four years ago was little known outside a handful of editorial boards, some state politicians and his family and friends. Not for this post a discussion of politics, of platforms, of left versus right. This post because after four centuries of American history, a black man stands on the podium to accept his party’s nomination.

I grew up in the South. I remember signs on drinking fountains that said “whites only” and “colored.” I remember knowing there were separate doors for black patients and white patients at Dr. Baldwin’s office. I knew then that black women rode in the back seat, never the front, although I once told Miss Ida that it wasn’t right for a child (me) to sit up front. Grown-ups sit there, I said. Hush, she said; that’s not the way it’s done.

Not the way it’s done.

I’ve spent almost 20 years here in Rockford, and I lived here through the beginning, middle and end of the Rockford School District’s discrimination lawsuit and subsequent desegregation. Millions of dollars and countless political nightmares later, the mantra remained: That’s not the way it’s done.

Not the way it’s done. Our failure as people of all colors to reconcile 400 years of racial chaos may well be our country’s greatest challenge to the future. For all too often, that reconciliation is not the way it’s done.

But today? Today for just a moment, we see a glimpse of what that reconciliation might look like. Barack Obama, Illinois’ favorite son, was nominated to be President of the United States.

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized