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Gatsby
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
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 Posted: Mon Nov 03, 2008 4:11 am Post subject: Something for America to be proud of |
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Here is a remarkable little news story about a woman who is 109 years old. She was born in the 19th century, the daughter of a man born into slavery. Her first vote was for FDR. And she lived long enough to vote in the 21st century for Barack Obama. What this woman must have gone through! I pray that she will live to see Obama inaugurated.
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=6154173
America has its faults, but it is also a nation that can confront them and change. It took a lot of work and sacrifice and idealism by many people, black and white, to get to this point.
There was a movie made four decades ago that anticipated this moment, almost eerily.
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November 2, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Guess Who�s Coming to Dinner
By FRANK RICH
AND so: just how far have we come?
As a rough gauge last week, I watched a movie I hadn�t seen since it came out when I was a teenager in 1967. Back then �Guess Who�s Coming to Dinner� was Hollywood�s idea of a stirring call for racial justice. The premise: A young white woman falls madly in love with a black man while visiting the University of Hawaii and brings him home to San Francisco to get her parents� blessing. Dad, a crusading newspaper publisher, and Mom, a modern art dealer, are wealthy white liberals � Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, no less � so surely there can be no problem. Complications ensue before everyone does the right thing.
Though the film was a box-office smash and received 10 Oscar nominations, even four decades ago it was widely ridiculed as dated by liberal critics. The hero, played by the first black Hollywood superstar, Sidney Poitier, was seen as too perfect and too �white� � an impossibly handsome doctor with Johns Hopkins and Yale on his r�sum� and a Nobel-worthy career fighting tropical diseases in Africa for the World Health Organization. What couple would not want him as a son-in-law? �He�s so calm and sure of everything,� says his fianc�e. �He doesn�t have any tensions in him.� She is confident that every single one of their biracial children will grow up to �be president of the United States and they�ll all have colorful administrations.�
What a strange movie to confront in 2008. As the world knows, Barack Obama�s own white mother and African father met at the University of Hawaii. In �Dreams From My Father,� he even imagines the awkward dinner where his mother introduced her liberal-ish parents to her intended in 1959. But what�s most startling about this archaic film is the sole element in it that proves inadvertently contemporary. Faced with a black man in the mold of the Poitier character � one who appears �so calm� and without �tensions� � white liberals can make utter fools of themselves. When Joe Biden spoke of Obama being �clean� and �articulate,� he might have been recycling Spencer Tracy�s lines of 41 years ago. |
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/opinion/02rich.html?em=&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1225713612-SAC3fE4TipgzVQ9qjgHjJg
Here's a clip from youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5kA31rV6sA
The entire movie is on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCLmB8qVP5k
And then there's this famous speech by Martin Luther King Jr., "I have a dream:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbUtL_0vAJk&feature=related
If only he were around to see this day. King would have been 80 by inauguration day.
I wish there had been more dignity to the other campaign, then I would have been prouder. But it serves as a reminder that overcoming bigotry has always been a cooperative effort between blacks and whites.
Now America needs to put the campaign behind and cooperate to solve its many problems. And so must the world.
This campaign demonstrates that we can solve our problems if we work together. We can be proud of that. |
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Kikomom
Joined: 24 Jun 2008
Location: them thar hills--Penna, USA--Zippy is my kid, the teacher in ROK. You can call me Kiko
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| Posted: Mon Nov 03, 2008 9:52 am Post subject: |
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CTD played on TCM last week. Remarkable, I had chills.
I pray that Mrs. Jones lives to see this too. She's lived thru many chapters of Civil Rights and Social Justice. Dear God, she deserves to see this chapter end because it is time for a new, long-overdue era to begin. |
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Gatsby
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
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Gatsby
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
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| Posted: Wed Nov 05, 2008 4:57 am Post subject: |
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http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2008/db081105.gif
So I guess that makes him the first American mocha President.
Hey, you know, now that we have sort of put race behind us, we can talk about race more openly. We can even laugh about it.
I hope. |
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