"The Courage to Remake the World As It Should Be"

[babylonsister]

http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/beyond/2008/11/the-courage-to-remake-the-worl.html

"The Courage to Remake the World As It Should Be"

By David Nather | November 4, 2008 10:18 PM


To understand the magnitude of what has just happened, you need to see it through the eyes of a House leader who feels vindicated for the risks he took nearly 50 years ago.

As a young civil rights demonstrator in South Carolina, James E. Clyburn — now the House majority whip, the third-ranking Democratic leader in that chamber — never dared to guess how long it might be before he’d see the election of the first African-American president.

“No one at that time ever thought it was possible,” Clyburn recalls now. Instead, he mostly just wondered whether he and his fellow demonstrators were accomplishing anything at all.

In March 1960, Clyburn was arrested in a march that protested a ban on demonstrations in the business district of Orangeburg, S.C. He testified in defense of a smaller group of protesters that was convicted of “breach of the peace.” The transcript of the trial drips with the condescension civil rights protesters in the South faced in that era. At one point, the prosecutor told the 19-year-old Clyburn, then a pre-law student at South Carolina State College, that “you are a good lawyer already.”

The next year, Clyburn spent three nights in jail as part of a march at the state Capitol in March 1961. The Supreme Court later overturned the convictions, once again for “breach of the peace.”

But as he sat in the jail cell, Clyburn recalls, he wondered whether he and his fellow civil rights protesters were just wasting their time. “That was when I was questioning whether any of this made any sense,” Clyburn said.

Earlier this year, in a speech to the NAACP, Barack Obama paid tribute to the civil rights leaders who blazed the trail that made his presidential candidacy possible. Clyburn wasn’t one of the famous names Obama mentioned that day. His sacrifices came not in the pivotal civil rights demonstrations that are immortalized in the history books, but in some of the many, smaller protests of that era that are barely remembered today.

But it was clear that Obama had people like Clyburn in mind that day in July, when he acknowledged his debt to “all those whose names never made it into the history books — those men and women, young and old, black, brown and white, clear-eyed and straight-backed, who refused to settle for the world as it is; who had the courage to remake the world as it should be.”

There were times when other civil rights veterans had their tensions with Obama, a biracial candidate from a younger generation who didn’t go through the same struggles and mostly treated race as an afterthought in his campaign. Clyburn, however, is at peace with Obama winning the ultimate political prize. He notes that Obama is about the same age as his daughter, Mignon, which is all the reason he needs to celebrate the achievements of the next generation

“What kind of fool would I be if I required my daughter to do what I did to be successful?” Clyburn asked. “I did it so she wouldn’t have to.”

Tonight, it’s clear that those nights in the jail cell weren’t a waste of time at all.

[But....]

1. Damn it, there you go...

and I had just cleared up my eyes from last nite:cry: