The president and I were born one day apart. Barack Obama’s birthday is August 4, and mine is August 5.
The year was 1961, and if you don’t think his election to the presidency is astonishing, consider the era we were born into:
In 1962, about two months after the president and I celebrated our first birthdays (I don’t know how he celebrated, but I plopped my foot in my birthday cake), riots broke out at the University of Mississippi to prevent a black man, James Meredith, from enrolling. Two people were killed, including a journalist who was shot in the back. One hundred sixty United States marshals and forty soldiers and National Guardsmen were injured. (Forty-six years later, in the first presidential debate of the 2008 election, Barack Obama would debate John McCain at Ole Miss. James Meredith was invited but declined to attend.)
In 1963, President Kennedy called for a civil rights bill that would end discrimination in public accommodations, from restaurants to schools. After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson shepherded the bill through Congress, despite Strom Thurmond’s assessment of the legislation as “unnecessary.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law on July 2, a month before the president and I turned three.
Ten days before the Civil Rights Act became law, civil rights workers James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were lynched in Neshoba County, Mississippi—where my mother and I would move four years later. Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were in Mississippi to register African American voters. (Yeah. See how unnecessary the Civil Rights Act was?)
The year the president and I were four, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. This act was a milestone—and it was gutted earlier this year by the US Supreme Court, which determined in a 5-4 ruling that the states with the worst histories of discrimination at the polls, including Mississippi, no longer need federal approval before changing their voting laws. Channeling Strom Thurmond from nearly fifty years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts dismissed the legislation as unnecessary. After all, that was then and this is now, right? Wrong. According to NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, the Voting Rights Act blocked more than one thousand proposed changes to voting laws between 1982 and 2006. Then is now.
But let’s turn our attention back to the good old days, when life wasn’t so confusing because everything was . . . well, you know, black and white.
In 1966, just before the president and I turned five, James Meredith was shot while on a march from Memphis to Mississippi to encourage black voters to register and to show up at the polls, where—despite the passage of the Voting Rights Act—the threat of violence was a strong possibility. Meredith recovered and continued the march. This man, who had not only been threatened with violence but had also been a victim of it, was undaunted. (More interesting facts about James Meredith: He was a veteran of nine years of service in the US Air Force when he enrolled at Ole Miss. He’s a Republican. And he once worked for Jesse Helms. Consider your mind boggled.)
Something else happened in 1966, when the president and I were five. My father died. I have a card that he carried in his wallet. It showed that he’d paid a poll tax and was therefore entitled to vote. Poll taxes were, by the way, made illegal by the twenty-fourth amendment to the constitution, which was ratified on January 23, 1964. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered five months later. The Civil Rights Act was passed ten days later. Five weeks after that, the president and I turned three. Still with me? Sorry. It’s hard to maintain chronological order when history is so turbulent.
In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated four months before the president and I turned seven. Two months before our birthdays, Robert Kennedy, who was committed to racial equality, was assassinated.
Most parents tell their children, “You can be anything you want to be,” and I have no doubt that Ann Dunham told her son exactly that. During the years I was growing up in Mississippi, the future president was living in Hawaii and Washington State, and when he was just six, he and his mother moved to Indonesia. Hawaii and Washington—let alone Indonesia—were worlds away from the Deep South. But Dunham, an accomplished, progressive person in her own right as well as the parent of a biracial son, would have been well aware of the fight for equal rights.
Discrimination wasn’t limited to the South. It was a national problem. It still is. The events I’ve mentioned in this post offer nothing more than a limited glimpse into the times in which the president and I were born. There was more violence. There were more murders. Children were hanged and bombed and burned alive. Less dramatically, there was everyday, ordinary, unremarkable discrimination at every level of American society. There still is.
And yet, despite the skewed perceptions, willful ignorance, and outright lies of the right, which seems determined to turn back time for minorities and women . . . despite the fact that this nation still lives a brutal, ugly history . . . and against tremendous odds, a black man is president.
Happy birthday, Mr. President. I’m right behind you.