By Robert Robinson, journalist, Nov. 07, 2008

As I watched the election results on the big screen with my family Tuesday night and heard the announcement that the 44th president of the United States would be Barack Obama, I found myself fighting back tears as I thought of just how far we have come as a country.

I thought about growing up in the Deep South and about my grandparents, who lived in a George Wallace-governed Alabama.

I thought about traveling to visit them from our home in the Florida Panhandle and how my Uncle George always had a .38 pistol under his car seat for protection as we drove the lonely dark Southern roads from our home to Alabama. I thought about how we always had to pack dinner in brown paper bags because we couldn't stop at restaurants. I thought about how we had to stop alongside the road because we could not use public bathrooms.

I thought about being born in 1955 and growing up in a city that was clearly black and white. I thought about how we'd go to the movies on Saturday, pay at the front box-office window and then have to go around to the side of the building and up the long iron steps to the balcony where the blacks had to sit. That was just the way it was.

I thought about never having a school textbook on the first day of the new school year that didn't already have someone else's name written in it. I thought about how it wasn't until I was bused across town to an all-white junior high school when schools were integrated in 1968 that I received a brand new school book.

I thought about that day in seventh grade world history class when a white classmate shouted, "I'm glad they got that King guy," on the morning after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. That was the only fight I was ever involved in.

I thought about all the racial fights that interrupted my freshmen year of high school because people still had not accepted integration. I can still see the rebel flags flying to this day.

I thought about the NAACP¹ "mass meetings" as they were called by black radio broadcasters that seemingly were held weekly in the city to plan protest marches or boycotts to combat unfair treatment of blacks.

I thought about nearly being run over by a white man who was apparently upset because I was walking across the parking lot of my high school football stadium where a George Wallace presidential campaign rally was being held.

I thought about at the age of 17 driving my granddad to his county commissioner's² home near Selma, Ala., pulling into the long driveway and watching my granddad walk all the way to the back of the house because even in 1972, he understood the unspoken rule that blacks did not go to the front door of a white person's home.

I thought about my single-parent mom working as a maid for most of her life, leaving her home to clean other people's homes and wash their clothes just to feed her six children.

I thought about in the early years of my journalism career being sent to cover a city council meeting and having to explain why I was there that I was a part of the news media.

I thought about all the wonderful opportunities that I have been afforded in my 53 years. I thought about how blessed I've been to travel to nearly every state of the union and to travel abroad. I thought about how far we have come, but how far we yet have to go.

But Tuesday night, Nov. 4, 2008, showed me that if you persevere³, anything is possible. That things can change and will change if we would work together as one, believe in each other and look beyond our differences. Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, said that it is our differences that make us who we are and what we can be as a people and as a nation.

I didn't think about the war, job layoffs, the sinking economy, the high cost of gas or the rising cost of food. None of that seemed to matter.

Instead, I thought about what a great time it is to be alive and living in America.
730 words

By Robert Robinson who is a deputy managing editor of Sports at USA TODAY.

Annotations:
1. NAACP - National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
2. county commissioner - Bezirksbeauftragter 3. to persevere - durchhalten, aushalten

Assignments:
1. What does Mr Robinson mean by living 'in a George Wallace-governed Alabama?
2. What was it like for a black person traveling from Florida to Alabama by 1960?
3. The author writes about 'busing'. What was it supposed to achieve and did it finally succeed?
4. What do you know about protest marches and boycotts organized by the NAACP?
5. How has life eventually changed for Robert Robinson?
6. What was more important for Mr Robinson than the Iraq war or the rising cost of food when he leant that B. Obama became president-elect?
7. What or who do you think helped B. Obama become the first African-American president-elect of the Unites States?

Source: USA TODAY, Nov. 07, 2008


More on Obama:

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama