By RONNIE ELLIS
FRANKFORT — I had a birthday this weekend. Don’t ask.
Let’s put it this way – I remember my Weekly Reader with the headline that Hawaii had become the nation’s 50th state. That was 1959, Dwight Eisenhower was president, Sputnik was giving America an inferiority complex but the Yankees occupied their rightful spot in the baseball universe. Nearly all my school mates – every one of whom was white – thought Mickey Mantle was king but, say hey, Willie Mays was pretty good. In fact, he was the best, but the Mick was the Mick and pinstripes were royalty.
Beyond thoughts of mortality, what brought this to mind were a presidential news conference and a bill introduced in Congress. Florida Republican Congressman Bill Posey has introduced a measure to require presidential candidates to produce proof of citizenship. Sounds reasonable you say? But I wonder if Posey would’ve sponsored the bill had the candidate born in the Panama Canal Zone been elected president.
I’ve encountered a bunch of signs questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship at those “TEA Party” protests of high taxes and federal spending. “Where’s the birth certificate?” During last fall’s campaign several people asked me if Obama is an American citizen or emphatically declared he isn’t – in spite of a 1961 Hawaiian birth certificate. His father was from Kenya but his mother was an American citizen born in Kansas.
Mark Twain might have put it this way: Obama was either born in Hawaii or in a state named Hawaii.
I’m old enough to recall watching Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News broadcasts showing Bull Conner’s boys – with dogs, Billy sticks and water hoses – clearing Birmingham streets of African-American civil rights protesters. I remember asking my Dad about the sign in the Glasgow restaurant which read: “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”
By then, I’d traded my Weekly Reader for The Courier-Journal where I read about Kentucky Sen. John Sherman Cooper voting for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I found black kids suddenly in my previously all white classes. The grown-ups were a little tense, and there were some problems, but nothing like the ones I’d seen on CBS News in Arkansas or Mississippi. I only realized later just how uncomfortable many of the black kids were, but after a few days back then, it didn’t seem like such a big deal to me. Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, Lou Brock and the St. Louis Cardinals beat Mantle, (ahem) Whitey Ford and the Yankees in the World Series. The next year Texas Western beat Rupp’s Runts. Before long, Glasgow even had an African-American mayor, Luska Twyman.
Last week I watched an African-American president at a press conference. It seems common enough by now – though not to everyone. He was asked about the arrest by Cambridge, Mass., police of his friend, an African-American Harvard scholar, in his own home. As Obama answered, there was a moment, a second, when his eyes widened, just before he said Cambridge police acted “stupidly.”
That caused a stir. But have you never been talking calmly when a painful memory of a perceived injustice suddenly flooded your consciousness? White America has little understanding of black America’s suspicions that police pull over or question blacks for behavior considered unthreatening by whites. It must be a feeling of vulnerability not unlike that felt by whites driving through an African-American neighborhood late at night in a big city.
I’ve had a lot of birthdays since reading that 1959 Weekly Reader. A lot has changed. But not everything, not everybody.
Ronnie Ellis writes for CNHI News Service and is based in Frankfort. He may be contacted by email at rellis@cnhi.com.
