Can Obama Free Missouri?
20 October 2008 9:25 am by Taylor Marsh
BY TAYLOR MARSH
McCain’s
having trouble, that’s an understatement, even in the Show Me state. But
for Obama, it’s a tall order given my home state’s history.
There was Dred Scott.
Brown v. Board of Education sent
shock waves.
The Missouri
KKK a scurrilous shame. At the turn of this century, an effort
to shun them. My big brother worked for A.G. John Ashcroft,
handling
a desegregation case (among many others) that became part of Ashcroft’s
confirmation (Senator Orin Hatch requesting a document from my brother that Ashcroft wasn’t racist), illustrating the battles that still lie within. (As an ironic aside, my brother was a
classmate of John McCain’s at the Naval Academy, before he blasted out because
his eye sight wasn’t going to allow him to fly jets. He landed from there in
the Marine Corps.)
We grew up in a cauldron of racial tensions, my mother remaining stuck in her
upbringing, thinking whitey was mighty. A “good Christian woman” as
the saying goes, she didn’t even realize she was bigoted, blinded by history.
It’s just the way things were, supposed to be, meant to be. It never ceased
to amaze me to hear racial language from this sweet woman’s mouth. The day busing
happened in my high school she was afraid for my life. It was tense, for sure,
fights breaking out, knives drawn, but we all survived. In Missouri, you had
to force the tides.
Seeing Obama’s crowd in St. Louis this past weekend, my heart skipped a beat.
That 100,000 Missourians, of all races, genders, creeds and political affiliations,
came out to see him means something, whether he can carry the state or not.
Harry Truman desegregated the Armed Forces. Coming from Missouri he knew the
importance of it more than most.
But Barack Obama winning in Missouri? It would be nothing short of shattering
history, writing a new chapter, turning the page, name it yourself. But it would
certainly be huge.
