I was about to be a senior in high school that summer, with my family on vacation in Provincetown, MA, at the tip of Cape Cod. All I really wanted to do was find Edna St. Vincent Millay’s summer hangout and the theater used by Eugene O’Neill and the Provincetown Players. Those were gone; instead, I tripped over a future that quickly ended my quest for the past.
Walking by a restaurant, we passed a TV sitting on the sidewalk, on a milk crate so everyone could watch. On the air: the March on Washington and the speech by Dr. Martin Luther King. I was transfixed. Living in a little town outside Pittsburgh, I hadn’t really paid much attention. Until that moment. It was August 28, 1963, and it launched the next phase of my life. As I watched, I knew that I belonged there – where there was purpose – in the middle of history. It was a profound thing to listen to this man, to see the sea of people around him, watch the individual interviews, hear the music. When people wonder how we became a generation of activists, I know that this was one of the moments that drove us forward, if we weren’t there already.
How beautiful then that EXACTLY 45 years later, Barack Obama will accept the nomination of his party to be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States. I heard Rep. John Lewis, so badly beaten in the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, tell an interviewer that he wasn’t sure he could make it through his own speech — that if anyone had told him that 45 years after that Selma march he’d watch an African-American man accept the presidential nomination, he would have told them they were crazy. Obama adviser and friend Valerie Jarrett, describing what it would mean to her parents in an interview with our own Erin Kotckei Vest, struggled to contain her own tears. This is important.
Continue reading MARTIN LUTHER KING AND BARACK OBAMA: ANOTHER COSMIC ANNIVERSARY