A remarkable vote
The following editorial appeared in Monday’s Los Angeles Times:
On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in the mouth of Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. Those first shots of the Civil War energized secessionists and codified this nation’s founding rift: the political and moral divide between those who owned slaves and those who would not abide the institution of slavery. It was the men of South Carolina who fired those shots and started the war that would define the United States and its young president from Illinois, one Abraham Lincoln.
On Saturday, descendants of those men and their families cast their votes, in overwhelming numbers, for a young senator from Illinois, for the first black man with a realistic opportunity to be elected president of the union that Lincoln saved.
It was, of course, a significant moment for Barack Obama and his passionate supporters. Backers of Hillary Rodham Clinton had spent all day bracing for it. “Regardless of today’s outcome …,” began one telling Clinton camp e-mail sent Saturday morning. But rather than parse the political advantage that Obama has gained with his victory – and it is the first time this primary season, one should note, that any Democratic candidate has won a straight majority in any contested state – we took a moment Sunday to reflect on what it suggests about America.
We are, it is often said, a young nation. Less than 150 years ago – the blink of a European eye – our forebears raised arms against one another and millions fell, slaughtered in conflict over the place of blacks in American society. Those slaves had arrived here in chains, families and lives sundered. Once freed by Lincoln, they were cast into a hostile land, where they lived for another century until a new and great generation of Americans – the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Earl Warren and, yes, Lyndon Johnson – helped set them free.
For two weeks now, we have been forced to endure a restrained but tiresome debate over the perennial questions of race in politics, over who deserves how much credit for liberating the descendants of slaves. The answer is that many good and brave souls acted, but even their actions were not enough until their work lodged in the hearts of those less brave, less foresighted.
On Saturday, black men and women stood beside whites and a smattering of Hispanics as a black man accepted South Carolina’s Democratic nomination for president. “This election,” Obama told a cheering crowd in the Confederacy’s cradle, “is about the past versus the future.” Whatever one thinks about Obama and Clinton, whether one is a Republican or a Democrat, that is a moment to treasure in our short history, a history marked by the pursuit of a perfected nation, where all are created equal.