Two-hundred-and-thirty-two years after we declared our independence from England in July 1776, the election of Barack Obama erased my long-held conclusion that the U. S. would not elect a person with black ancestry to its highest office in my lifetime.

Our Declaration of Independence said that “. . . all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The 56 men who signed that Declaration included General William Whipple, my fourth cousin six times removed, who represented New Hampshire in the Continental Congress. Our common ancestor was Matthew Whipple born about 1560 in Bocking, Essex County, England. Some of those 56 men did not practice what they declared as many were slave holders, including my cousin William who owned Prince, who it is believed was acquired when he was a boy in early 1760 when he arrived from Africa. Prince served him during his entire time in Congress.

The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution signed in Philadelphia September 17, 1787 stated the Constitution was formed to promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. However, Article I contained language that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. Section 9 of Article I provided that the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight. This provision emerged from the sectional struggle in the Constitutional Convention between northern and southern delegates. South Carolina Delegate Charles C. Pickney argued his state and Georgia could not “do without slaves,” and John Rutledge of S.C. threatened that three states of the lower South would secede unless permitted to continue this traffic. Article IV provided that when an escaped slave was caught, he/she was to be returned to their master.

In 1807, Congress outlawed the African slave trade effective January 1, 1808. In 1820, it declared the slave trade to be piracy punishable by death but retained the right of individuals to buy and sell slaves and to transport them from one slave state to another.

Slavery was finally ended by the Civil War which was fought between April 12, 1861 and May 10, 1865. My great grandfather Lucien Ransom Whipple fought in that war on the side of the Union (Indiana 6th Cavalry) from July 29, 1862 until it ended. President Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves on New Years Day 1863 when he executed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Subsequent to the war, seventeen states passed segregation laws which required separate schools for white and black students. The schools were supposed to be equal. However, legislatures never funded the schools equally and black schools were incredibly inferior to white schools. Also, public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and restrooms were segregated and blacks had to sit at the back of buses and streetcars.

The country amended the Constitution (Amendment XV) granting African American men the right to vote by declaring that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Although ratified on February 3, 1870, the promise of the Amendment would not be fully realized for almost a century. Through the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other means, Southern states effectively disenfranchised African Americans until passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 made it possible for the majority of African Americans in the South to register to vote.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, my eighth cousin once removed, had a mixed record on civil rights.  The Congress was dominated by Southerners whose support he needed to pass his New Deal programs and and who opposed legislation for racial equality.  All moves to integrate the races resulted in complaints to Roosevelt by Southern members of  Congress and Governors caused him to uphold segregation for the sake of keeping his Party together.

He did, however, allow them to serve as delegates to the Democratic National Convention for the first time, abolished the two-thirds rule that gave the South veto power over presidential nominations, added a civil rights plank for the first time ever to the 1940 party platform, and included blacks in the draft with the same rights and pay scaled as whites.  He issued Executive Order 8802 in June 1941 which was the most important federal move to support the rights of blacks between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  It prohibited the federal government and corporations that received federal contracts from hiring based on race, color, creed, or national origin.

But he did not support anti-lynching legislation nor would he desegregate the military which had been segregated since the Civil War.  It was left to his successor President Harry Truman to fully desegregate the armed forces.

In the fall of 1950, I enrolled as a sophomore at the University of Mississippi where I joined the staff of the college newspaper, The Mississippian, as an editorial assistant to Albin Krebs, a native of Pascagoula, Mississippi and its editor. In the October 27 issue of the paper, in a signed editorial, Krebs advocated admittance of Negroes to the University’s professional schools because the state did not provide separate graduate level programs for blacks. Krebs wrote that a man’s color should not deny access to education at that level.

Theodore Bilbo, a member of the Ku Klux Klan and a Mississippi U.S. Senator, when campaigning for reelection in 1946 declared that individuals encouraging blacks to register to vote should be “automatically bombed and exterminated from the face of the earth” and called on “every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls.” Bilbo denounced the editorial and Krebs on the floor of the U.S. Senate as did Congressman John Rankin in the House of Representatives. Rankin of Tupelo, Mississippi was elected to his fifteenth term in November 1950.

On Monday night October 30, about 400 demonstrators gathered on the lawn of Kreb’s dormitory. I was with him in his third floor room. We built a barricade by piling all of the furniture in front of the door. A cross was lighted under the dorm window, gasoline thrown on the fire, and the flame soared up three floors as the crowd –- some dressed in Klan garb –- called for a hanging rope. The crowd dispersed about midnight after circulating a petition demanding Krebs resign as editor.

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decided by a vote of 9-0 (Brown v. Board of Education) that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and explicitly outlawed racial segregation of public education facilities. It declared “separate but equal” could never truly provide black Americans with facilities of the same standards available to white Americans.

In his last Message to the Congress on the State of the Union the evening of January 14, 1969, President Lyndon B. Johnson noted that during his presidency “. . . voting rights and the voting booth that we debated so long . . . and the doors to public service are open at last to all Americans regardless of their color.” I was present at that speech as a guest of Congressman Allard Lowenstein of New York who I had worked with in the campaign to end the Viet Nam war.

In 1972, U.S. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm of New York became the first major black candidate to seek nomination for President. She ran on the Democratic ticket. She and I served together on the Democratic National Committee and were table mates at a dinner at the White House January 13, 1969, invited by President Johnson. The Marine Corps band provided musical entertainment. Richard Nixon was inaugurated President a week later and during the dinner President Johnson predicted it would be the last time the White House would have a good time for the next four years. I was acquainted with Rev. Jesse Jackson, a black man who first sought the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1984. We first met at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida where I was Chairman of the Oregon Delegation. The country was not yet ready for a black President and neither of these individuals achieved much success in their campaigns.

I cite these instances as justification of my conclusion it would not happen in my lifetime. The election of Obama was an extraordinary change. My four and seven-year-old grandsons were here in an historic time for the United States. They are sitting on history’s front row.

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