The Content Of His Character

In August of 1963, a muggy, sweltering day, a Senior at Mt. Vernon High School stood by the reflecting pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.  The student was only one of many many thousands that day, gathered in the hopes that some day there would be peace between white and black Americans.  That student was me, and I was less than a month from my 17th Birthday. 

As a 6th grader I witnessed the hostility and hatred of my fellow whites when Central High School in Little Rock was integrated.  I cringed when called “nigger-lover” by some of my school mates who had never gone to school with blacks or ever associated with them or maybe even never knew one.  You see, I grew up in the Army, my dad was a career officer and the Military had been integrated by President Truman in 1948.  Integration was all I knew and I had no problems with it.

But, I digress, I stood with the thousands and listened to the tenor voice of Martin Luther King.  As his voice rang out, this phrase in particular struck me, as it still does 45 years later:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Judged by the content of their character.  What a concept that is, when at the time, so many were judged by the color of their skin, the region they came from or the god that they worshiped, should not be judged by these things, but by their character.

And so we have arrived at today, having been through tumult, asassinations, riots and slow but positive growth, to a point where African Americans are elected by solid majorities to office in the south, where the bastions of hatred have been ground down, but unfortunately, where there are also those who would keep the races apart (Jessie, Al, are you reading this?) and those who depend on anger and hostility to keep their names in light.

We have had African Americans as Secretary of State, as Generals and Admirals, as Presidents of large Corporations, and now, a black American is running for President of the United States and it looks like he will get the nomination from the Democrat Party.  Yet, in my opinion, the content of their character is still important.

Barack Obama proclaimed he would pull out of Iraq immediately, and now he says he won’t.  He said that he would be using public financing for his race, and now he won’t.  He has said that NAFTA was anathema, and now all of a sudden, it isn’t.  He has attended a church where some of the most vile racist comments made from a pulpit have rung forth, and now he says that wasn’t the Jeremiah Wright he knew.  He has associated with, and benefited from associations with an admitted but unconvicted urban terrorist.  He has manipulated opposition off of the ballot in order to win elections.  And he has said, in spite of no one making this association BUT him, that the opposition will play the race card. 

The content of his character has been weighed.

And has been found wanting!

xposted at GM’s Corner