MY LIFE-----ONE STONE IN THE GREAT WALL
My name is John Richard (Dick) Cooper. Most of you have never heard of me. I am an African American who grew up in a time when there have been significant changes and progress made regarding race and gender issues. These changes have occurred throughout my lifetime and continue to occur throughout our country. We, me and my family, have been deeply involved in these changes. As with any change, there have been both positives and negatives. The positives are there for everyone to see. Blacks and females have made it into most professions that were previously taboo: sports, business, politics, fashion, entertainment etc. Blacks can buy and rent in most communities and can stay in hotels and can eat in restaurants. They don't have to sit in the back of the bus, or ride on the rough wooden seats in the railway cars provided for them on the trains. They are now allowed to vote. We're at a point in time, 2008, when a black man was elected President of the USA for the first time in its history, and his strongest opponent in the process for their Party's nomination was a female; and the opposition party had a female, Sarah Palin, running on its ticket as its Vice Presidential candidate.
However, along with the positives there have been negatives. My son will point some of these out to me and my wife whenever we have a discussion on this subject. He grew up in an integrated community and went to integrated schools. As a consequence, he feels that the friendships he has developed have been very limited and that there are still employment problems, especially in the area of promotions based on ones capabilities. But to me, the biggest negative is what has happened to many of the communities that were all black when I was growing up and that have remained so throughout this period. When you consider these areas in cities such as Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Wilmington, Delaware, Columbus, Ohio etc., many of them have completely deteriorated. When I was a youngster living in an all black area, blacks of all social and economic levels lived together. Doctors, butlers, teachers, principals, ministers, janitors, lawyers, welfare recipients, we all lived together in houses next to each other. Once open housing occurred, the blacks with the educational and social backgrounds and the financial capabilities and leadership abilities left. Along with this void, the cities themselves lost interest in seeing that these areas were properly maintained. These areas also became infested with drugs and crime starting in the 80's.
The positive changes that have occurred are the result of the efforts of many going all the way back to the Civil War and before. Improvements have been experienced in race relations from generation to generation; and the question can be asked, since many of the problems have been resolved, "Why look back? Why not keep focused on the future?"
An interesting article appeared in the New York Times Magazine Section the second week of August, 2008. The article was entitled, "Is Obama the End of Black Politics?". The Article was written by Matt Bai. The theme of the article is that the younger generations of African Americans recognize that what happened in the past is of the past; it shouldn't be ignored but it is time to move on. The article pointed out that most of the older African Americans in Congress and the general public originally supported Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic Presidential Candidate: whereas, the younger generations were all for Obama. For example one section of the article read as follows:
For a lot of younger African-Americans, the resistance of the civil rights generation to Obama's candidacy signified the failure of their parents to come to terms, at the dusk of their lives, with the success of their own struggle - to embrace the idea that black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines long ago joined the political mainstream.
"I'm the new black politics," says Cornell Belcher, a 38-year-old pollster who is working for Obama. "The people I work with are the new black politics. We don't carry around that history. We see the world through post-civil-rights eyes. I don't mean that disrespectfully, but that's just the way it is.
"I don't want in any way to seem critical of the generation of leadership who fought so I could be sitting here," Belcher told me when we met for breakfast at the Four Seasons in Georgetown one morning. He wears his hair in irreverent spikes and often favors tennis shoes with suit jackets. "Barack Obama is the sum of their struggle. He's the sum of their tears, their fights, their marching, their pain. This opportunity is the sum of that".
"But it's like watching something that you've been working on all your life sort of come together right before your eyes, and you can't see it," Belcher said. "It's like you've been building the Great Wall of China, and you finally put that last stone in. And you can't see it. You just can't see the enormity of it."
The latest evidence of tension between Obama and some older black leaders burst onto cable television last month, after an open microphone on Fox News picked up the Rev. Jesse Jackson crudely making the point that he wouldn't mind personally castrating his party's nominee. The reverend was angry because Obama, in a Father's Day speech on Chicago's South Side, chastised black fathers for shirking their responsibilities. To Jackson, this must have sounded a lot like a presidential candidate polishing his bona fides with white Americans at the expense of black ones - something he himself steadfastly refused to do even during his second presidential run in 1988, when he captured more votes than anyone thought possible.
Most of the coverage of this minor flap dwelled on the possible animus between Jackson and Obama, despite the fact that Obama himself, who is not easily distracted, seemed genuinely unperturbed by it. But more interesting, perhaps, was the public reaction of Jesse Jackson Jr., the reverend's 43-year-old son, who is a congressman from Illinois and the national co-chairman of Obama's campaign. The younger Jackson released a blistering statement in which he said he was "deeply outraged and disappointed" by the man he referred to, a little icily, as "Reverend Jackson." Invoking his father's most famous words, Jesse Jr. concluded, "He should keep hope alive and any personal attacks and insults to himself."
The same attitude probably exists today, among many of the younger generation of Blacks, concerning the many other issues that confronted African Americans during my life time. Things have certainly changed, and recounting what happened to me during my life span, may result in "ho-hums" from them and others who recognize that much progress has been made, and that we need to continue to look forward and not delve on the past. But putting that thought aside, I'm writing this document, not in criticism, but as a history and chronicle of what occurred and what happened to me, my wife and our family during these times of change. It is being written as a historical record for my grandchildren and their off spring because my wife and I view our experience as "One of the stones in the Great Wall".
