What Obama Means to Me

My parents were white shopkeepers in the black ghetto of Harlem, living in back of a small store, selling things to people even poorer than they were. Their customers were descended from African slaves, while they themselves had left behind a Europe where their kind would soon be killed by the millions.

We were all safe here from servitude and slaughter, but not fully American, free but far from equal.

When I was three and seriously ill, my parents gave up the store and moved away, but my father kept working in Harlem for the next forty years. When I was old enough, I would sometimes go with him on a Saturday for the fourteen hours he spent in a pawnshop there.

The patrons came parading through, most of them well-dressed, almost all black, carrying clothes, jewelry, musical instruments, cameras to offer as hostage for the few dollars they had to have for a few days or weeks.

Some seemed down and defeated, but many were jaunty, with the aliveness of people always dancing on the edge. Seeing me, they flashed white smiles from their dark faces, surprised and amused to find a kid among the forbidding figures guarding the pawnbroker’s cash box. I always smiled back, trying to drink in some of their joy.

Pawnbrokers made loans to the desperate, with higher interest than banks were allowed to charge. In earlier days, they were little more than fences, acquiring stolen goods cheap to resell. Now strict laws required them to be wary--but it was a sad business, bordering on usury, profiting from human misery. For my father, it was simply where he worked sixty hours a week to earn sixteen dollars.

Once he brought home an autograph, from Colonel Hubert Julian, an American pilot who single-handed had opposed Mussolini’s air force in Abyssinia to become known as Haile Selassie’s “Black Eagle.” What led him to a Harlem pawnshop I never learned, but for years I saved that scrap with the flamboyant signature of a genuine hero.

In the windows of Harlem shops, black-on-yellow placards showed the week’s offerings of local movie houses: Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen (huge letters) in “Gone With the Wind” with (much smaller) Clark Gable, or “The Big Broadcast of 1937” starring Rochester and (footnote size) Jack Benny. There was so little to nourish pride on those streets that when Joe Louis (called by newspapers, without irony, “a credit to his race”) knocked out Max Schmeling in their 1938 rematch for the heavyweight title, Harlem erupted in riotous joy.

After returning from World War II, I went to work at City College's Harlem campus, where I fell in love with a beautiful, brilliant young woman. But a decade before Barack Obama was born, we--certainly I--did not have the courage to marry and bring interracial children into that world so little changed from the time of my own childhood.

When the new president takes the oath of office tomorrow, my heart and all those memories will be with him.

Michelle Obama's Pride

Those who were perplexed, annoyed and/or enraged by Mrs. Obama's statement that "for the first time in my adult life I'm proud of America" may want to take a look at HBO's contribution tonight to Black History Month, a documentary about Joe Louis.

Called, without irony, "a credit to his race," the heavyweight champion was exalted in 1938 for beating the exemplar of Nazi Germany, Max Schmeling, but never accepted as a true American. Decades later, when playing golf in San Diego, he found excrement in the first hole.

As a white child growing up in the Harlem ghetto, I saw how little of the pride that Michelle Obama now feels was within reach of its black residents. Movie placards in store windows would read "Gone With the Wind with Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen," followed in smaller type by "Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh."

In World War II, I was greeted by glares for sitting in the back of a bus in Charleston, South Carolina, and only my uniform spared me from more physical reactions by white riders.

In the 1950s, it took a Supreme Court desegregation decision to let children who looked like Michelle Obama go to school with those who didn't and, in the years afterward, they were beaten in the streets for marching with Martin Luther King for the audacity of wanting to exercise their right to vote.

In 1985, in her senior thesis, the future Mrs. Obama wrote, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong...it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."

Now millions of Americans of all races are voting to make Barack Obama their president. His wife's pride is understandable, and those who attack her manner of expressing it would do well to recall its origins and examine their own motives.