I was a one-year-old in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled against segregation in public schools in Brown vs The Board of Education.  When I was 2 years old, in December of 1955 Rosa Parks, a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus. The bus driver had her arrested.  After a 381 day boycott of public transportation, the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation of public transportation was unconstitutional.

Just after my 4th birthday the “Little Rock Nine” required federal troops to escort them to high school.  I was almost 7 when four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College begin a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter.  The following year was the time of the “freedom riders“, student volunteers harassed and beaten for taking bus trips through the South to test out new laws that prohibited segregation in interstate travel facilities.

When I was ten, in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed in Birmingham, Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary, 37-year-old Medgar Evers, was murdered outside his home, Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Four young girls (Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins) attending Sunday school were killed when a bomb explodes at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a popular location for civil rights meetings, and JFK was gunned down in Dallas Texas.
I was twelve in 1965 when Malcolm X was murdered.  That was the year that we watched on television when Blacks begin a march to Montgomery in support of voting rights and were stopped at the Pettus Bridge by a police blockade. Fifty marchers were hospitalized after police used tear gas, whips, and clubs against them.

In 1968, when I was almost 15 years old, Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis Tennessee and Bobby Kennedy was murdered in LA.  I grew up in a violent, racist, frightened nation, when Black Americans were routinely treated as less-than human.

Last night I cried listening to Barrack Hussein Obama’s acceptance speech.  While I know Obama’s election does not automatically end racism and bigotry in the US.  As Winston Churchill said in another context, “…this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”  I am filled with hope.