Obama on Cover of Ebony- In Our Lifetime

Barack Obama is on the cover of the March 2008 Issue of Ebony.

The title on the cover is:

IN OUR LIFETIME
- Are we really witnessing the election of the nation's First Black President?

It's not a bad article, and the one thing I appreciate is that they list a number of Obama's ' Black Circle' (take that Andrew Young).

UPDATE:

IN OUR LIFETIME.

I thought a some more about that headline.

In.Our.Lifetime.

Three simple words that convey so much in them.

I've written elsewhere that, as this campaign has gone on, I've been collecting stories and especially pictures. The ones that bring me to tears sometimes, are the ones of our elders and the ones of our youth.

I wondered elsewhere, just who was this vote for Obama FOR? Is this vote for him for US? Or is it for our past and our future? For those who have lived and seen things we never did, and for those yet to come. I came to the conclusion that Barack Obama is for my 80 year-old mother and my not-yet-born great-niece.

Both my parents were closing in on 50 when I was born (46 &48). The world of their childhoods and early adulthoods had changed dramatically, and the world I was born into wasn't theirs. My parents were born in the Jim Crow South: Mama- Mississippi, Daddy -Tennessee.

If my father hadn't of come North, he would have been 43 years old before he would have experienced freely ' full citizenship' in this country, and that was AFTER he had put his life on the line for his country.

In Our Lifetime.

I think about my parents and what they experienced, and how they fought so that I wouldn't have to experience it. How so clearly, they see Obama as what they fought FOR, as well as a gift to those yet to come.

I think about my great-niece, soon to join the family in May. Half African-American, Half Mexican-American, she will enter into a world not remotely like the one of her great-grandmother. She will grow up in a world where the blending of America is her life, and will think nothing of it. She will literally BE the ' diversity' that is bandied about so frequently. Most of all, it's possible, she will sit, in that 8th grade history class, years from now, bored out of her mind, as the teacher drones on about President Obama. But, more importantly, sitting in that class, bored with her, will be other Black, White, Hispanic, Asian boys and girls.

In.Our.Lifetime.