Hope rising from fear. Late October, 2008.

Of all the images that burst through television screens during the tumultuous 1960s – the violent clashes between police and student protesters, the assassinations of civil rights figures and the seemingly endless wave of body bags containing the unfortunate results of a horrific mistake in Vietnam – perhaps the most disturbing were the pictures of African-Americans in the south fighting for their rights in a region that still considered them second-class citizens.
Dogs were turned on black children, water cannons blasted those who tried to peacefully assemble and authorities cracked heads and ribs to quell movements designed to register blacks to vote.
It was, perhaps, the saddest time in America’s cultural history.
But no matter how deeply entrenched cultural racism in the south contributed to the brutality exacted upon blacks who were simply trying to express their Constitutional rights, every movement designed to keep groups from attaining what is rightfully theirs must be aided by a authoritative political voice.
In the 1960s, it was Alabama Governor George Wallace at the helm of this racist ship. Joining him as deck hands were sheriffs and local elected officials throughout the south, aiding and abetting in a policy of Rights Denial. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided a Constitutional guarantee of voting and other rights for blacks – more than 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
But fast forward more than a generation. Now, with the presidential election looming large on the national horizon, the seeds of hate sown more than 40 years ago are still bearing fruit for the bigoted among us.
The vicious, inaccurate vitriol that has spewed from the mouths of the McCain campaign’s leadership and surrogates – that Barack Obama is a “Muslim,” that he “pals around with domestic terrorists,” that “we don’t really know who he is” – mirror the rhetoric that spewed forth from the Rights Deniers back in the 1960s in as much as it now manifests itself in dangerous ways that they can be described as noting less than frightening.
At McCain rallies recently, speeches by the Republican nominee and, especially, his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, have whipped crowds into such a frenzy that people have been overheard by various reporters shouting “treason,” “terrorist” and even “kill him” when referencing Obama.
All that’s missing are the torches, a measure of rope and a solid branch.
The continuation of this campaign strategy, as shameful as it is in practice as in the fact that it’s not working, is that is has the potential to become violent, a turn-back-the-clock episode of a new political tactic, a progeny with eerie scents of past political hate speech.
No person with a fully functioning mind can say with a straight face that Obama is a Muslim, that he is a terrorist, that he is nothing less than a magnificent manifestation of the American Dream.
No, nobody can really believe this. Nobody can believe that Obama is a Manchurian candidate, that he presents a clear and present danger to the country if elected president. Anyone who does has been injected with such copious amounts of ignorance that their only hope is for a complete realignment of their cultural consciousness.
At the heart of these outrageous attacks on the Democratic nominee is a river of covert racism that still runs healthily just under the surface of our country’s self-awareness.
These people are afraid, but not about what an Obama presidency would look like or what he wants to do – the affordable healthcare or the tax breaks for the middle-class or the realignment of our national priorities in a progressive direction. No, they’re afraid of a black man holding the highest office on Earth and exactly what that means for their world-view.
It must be difficult knowing that if a black man is given so much power, so much prestige, that one will have to – in the deep corners of their mind – reassess what it means to be a citizen of the United States. For some, perhaps even many, Obama’s now seemingly likely victory on Election Day will require a paradigm shift of significant proportions.
But it will also be one of the greatest days in the history of our country. We will have shown to the world that we can live-up to who we say we are. We can finally put to rest the Old Politics of the past – the kind that divides in order to conquer, that smears instead of inspires, that stokes the fires of hatred and difference rather than holds-up the quest for compassion and cooperation.
Obama’s election will be seminal, and it could be the moment that that river of racism finally starts to come to the surface of our society, where we can deal with it, discuss it and, eventually, see it evaporate under the bright light of a new generation of hope, progress and understanding of our fellow countrymen and women.