Tonight's Music is Sweet

Some two million people are converging on our nation's capitol tonight in anticipation of witnessing the most emotionally charged moment in our nation's history.

Racism has long been the ugliest thing about this great country.

I witnessed its horrors throughout my childhood. An early memory is when my cousins claimed that black people "smelled different." In every Michigan city, I could see that blacks lived in the worst part of town. My friends and relatives made fun of these people. They told jokes that so disgusted me that later, alone in my bed at night, I swore I would never turn out like them.

It wasn't that I knew any black people or had any black friends.

It was that I myself was an outsider, lonely, awkward, virtually friendless, and considered very weird by others who did not share my geeky obsessions.

In many ways I was a white Negro.

Luckily, when I got to college, one of my roommates was black. He and his friends soon became my friends, to such an extent that I was invited to join one of the two all-black fraternities at the University of Michigan.

But, as much as I appreciated the offer, I didn't like the idea of fraternities. I was so far outside the mainstream in my sensibilities that I preferred hanging much further away from the center of college culture, which is how I discovered journalism.

Journalism is, of course, a profession suited for outsiders like me, for those people who really can never fully fit in, but who feel they have a story to tell nonetheless.

Accordingly, my very best college reportage ended up being devoted to the civil rights movement. Six of us idealistic young reporters drove to Memphis, Tennessee, to cover and participate in what (little did we know) would be the last march ever led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Somewhere, I still have old faded photos of us as we made our way through the gauntlet of troops with guns and bayonets, supposedly there to protect us. I will spare you the racist epithets these "protectors" spat out at us as we passed.

But, tonight, and tomorrow, a new music is ringing across this land. All of the awful, racist hatred that has so stunted our growth as a people will now have to be set aside as we welcome our new First Family to lead -- not just some of us -- but all of us, into a better future.

May God bless the new President of the United States!

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