Howard Witt/Chicago Tribune: Big moment but ‘small step’

Here are a few excerpts from an article from Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune regarding the inauguration of Barack Obama. The view the entire article click here.

• On Tuesday, Hannah Jane Hurdle-Toomey, one of the last living children of an African-American slave, will be watching intently on TV as an African-American family takes up residence in the White House, a national monument built by slaves.

“At last, the time has come,” said the 76-year-old retired Oregon pastor whose father, Andrew Jackson Hurdle, was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1845. “This at least will give our young African-American children hope that they, too, can achieve. We had just about collectively given up.”

• “We have done our level best. We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them, and we would have done it if we could,” declared Benjamin Tillman, a South Carolina governor and senator, speaking of black Americans on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1900.

“We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it. We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men, and we never will.

• The nation’s 44th president will scarcely resemble all the Establishment white men who came before him. In fact, even as the Obamas finally integrate 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. after more than 200 years, outgoing President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, will be heading back to Texas to a newly-purchased home in an exclusive, 82-percent-white Dallas neighborhood where, until just a few years ago, home sellers routinely attached “racial covenants” to their property deeds to prevent blacks from buying in.

• “The reality is that, for African-Americans, we have lost all the progress we had made since the 1960s,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles and a leading expert on school desegregation. “For whites, it is a lost opportunity to prepare” for the nation’s multiethnic future. Contrary to the fondest hopes of liberal Americans—and the insistent declarations of conservatives—America is decidedly not yet “post-racial.”

• “I don’t think we are going to be walking up to him and saying ‘Brother President,’ ” Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, told a forum at Williams College in November. “He’s not the Black Caucus president. He is the president of America. He’s the leader of all Americans.”