Everyone I know was touched by the tears pouring down Jesse Jackson’s face when he stood among the crowd in Grant Park to acknowledge the election of Barack Obama. Students at a largely black college in Chicago that I know of took a very different view of the matter. They thought the only reason he cried was because he wasn’t up there getting congratulated. I took this as a sign of the utmost cynicism. They could not raise themselves out of their dislike of Jesse Jackson and what he had not done for them lately to see him as experiencing the enormity of what had taken place, that after all this time and so many struggles, including those in which Jackson took part, a black man had finally made it. Jackson, in fact, was being acknowledged that day as one of those who had set the stage for Obama. (First, Rosa would not stand; then, Martin had a dream; then, Jesse would make his run; and, then, Barack would win his race.) That is enough historical importance for anyone, and I think Jesse appreciates that.

The students who chastised Jackson for his tears belittle Obama's accomplishment by reducing it to who crossed the finish line first, as if there were nothing else at stake. Do they not sense the enormity of what took place, as well as the history that allowed it to take place? This triumph takes place in my own lifetime, and I remember back to Emmett Till. History tells me about the Scottsboro Boys and Alton Locke, the first black Rhodes Scholar, and Paul Robeson, who couldn't get a job as a lawyer, and back before that to Frederic Douglass and Harriet Tubman.  They were all in my mind on Election Day. Why weren't they on the minds of those students? That people don’t know their own history will bring forward only unspecified resentment.

I have my own way of gauging the enormity of Obama’s victory. The other night, a few days after the election, I saw the 1944 movie, “This Is The Army”, a not very good example of flagwaving that combined gooey and clichéd romance with patriotism and a score by Irving Berlin. A set of soldiers tour the nation to promote war bonds by putting on a show that includes a drag chorus line and acrobats dressed up in soldier suits. The most memorable thing about it is Irving Berlin dressed up in World War I regalia, singing “I Hate To Get Up In The Morning.” Ronald Reagan, who is the stage manager for the show, greets a Negro act consisting of some very good dancers who are accompanied by Joe Louis working a punching bag. Louis gives some potted platitudes to George Murphy, also in the cast, and Murphy says that he couldn’t have said it better himself, which is to say that Louis managed to say something coherent if mumbled and was to be congratulated for that, never mind that it had been written out for him and all he was to do was recite it. Louis’ labor delivery was painful for me to watch, and the same would have been the case at the time for the audience at the time, and may well have been part of the intended experience, in that Hattie McDaniel had engendered the same feeling when she delivered the acceptance speech written for her when she received her award for Best Supporting Actress a few years before for Gone With the Wind.

The troupe makes it to Washington D.C. and performs for the person Reagan calls the Boss. FDR is seen, from a distance, walking to his seat.

My fantasy is that I time travel back to meet with Reagan at about the time he made the film. I tell him it is ironic that in thirty five years, he will become the Boss, and that even George Murphy will become a United States Senator. I then break the news that only a little more than a quarter century after that, a Black person will be elected President of the United States. I think he would be flabbergasted and perhaps make sense of it by observing that sixty years is a good deal of American history. And such would certainly be the case. It was sixty years between the election of Thomas Jefferson and the election of Abraham Lincoln; it was sixty years between Lincoln and Wilson.  So it could happen over time, the nation change enough for it to happen.

But these have been my sixty years, from Roosevelt to Obama. The struggle for Civil Rights takes precedence, in my mind, over the War in Vietnam, which only seemed at the time as if it would go on forever, or the woman’s movement or the gay movement, both inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, or even the Cold War, which nearly killed us all, but never made it to our homeland, as what was accomplished in my lifetime. My post-Greatest Generation generation can take pride in that, and we can all celebrate while Obama is already thinking about how to clean up the mess left over from the past eight years. I am going to stretch out my celebration at least through the Inauguration. My emotion is joy, which vies with love to be the most noble of the emotions.