“Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring — when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics — will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” (Martin Luther King Jr -– I have a dream)
Then and in the blink of an eye the United States of America demonstrated that it is possible to turn an oil tanker quicker than a speed boat, move mountains and even fulfill the dream impossible. Moreover that, in the aggregate of the numbers making up that great melting pot, there remains a pioneering spirit, striving for that which unites and strengthens them, which better defines this land of liberty than any mishaps they encounter along the way.
In 1857 in the Supreme Court decision of Dred Scott versus Sandford, Chief Justice Roger B Taney held that slaves were “so inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”. Just four years on Abraham Lincoln would take the Union (US Federal government) into the American Civil War in respect of the issue of slavery against the 11 Confederate States led by Jefferson Davis who had seceded because they refused to accept the anti-slavery direction in which the country was headed.
Ironically Abraham Lincoln was a Republican who would pay with his life for the principles in which he believed. John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate spy having attended a speech by Lincoln promising voting rights to blacks, shot him at point blank range at a theatre in April of 1865.
In that same year of 1865 the Confederate Army would surrender whereafter the Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution was passed which abolished and, to this day, prohibits slavery in the United States. A year later the Fourteenth Amendment was passed to secure the rights of former slaves and legislate against the decision in Dred Scott versus Sandford.
Freedom from slavery was, however, just the first step in what would be a further 153- year struggle to attain the equality which Obama’s victory has finally confirmed.
African Americans down those long and arduous years would still be the victims of racism and discrimination which lives on even today. Segregation, formal and informal, replaced outright slavery only itself to be replaced by a glass ceiling which set limits on how far black Americans could go.
It would be wrong to suggest that discrimination died last night just as it would have been wrong to say that slaves achieved real freedom through the American Civil War. It all began with a necessary step without which the process could not get underway.
Without the abolition of slavery the long journey to freedom could not have begun. Without the abolition of segregation the process of unity could not have begun. Without the destruction of the glass ceiling the end of real and perceived limitations could not begin.
What last night showed is that tens of millions of white voters believe that the best man for the most powerful office in the world is Barack Obama. If that be so then what office in the United States of America, or indeed the world, is beyond the reach of African Americans or black people?
In one moment of blinding purity the USA showed the world that she is still that wonderfully inconsistent melting pot from which everything emerges. If she isn’t creating a Hollywood, flying to the moon and beyond, she is tearing up all the books on political theory and saying “yes we can” elect our first black president.
Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, will have to deal with inter alia an enormous global crisis, huge trade deficit, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, healthcare and repairing the US image abroad.
Yet watching that election unfold and seeing the unthinkable become the reality because this is a land of Bravehearts with huge hearts, you had the feeling that Obama and the American people will succeed in turning adversity into triumph.
Because they can.
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