Today I want to start by telling you the story of a young black guy who, eighteen years ago, was frustrated and unhappy with the way his career was going. He had rashly challenged an incumbent congressman in the Democratic primary the year before, spent a lot of money he didn’t have, and ended up getting his behind kicked big-time, losing more than two to one.
He had two young daughters and a wife who wasn’t thrilled that he’d run for Congress, and he had to figure out what to do next. In the end, he didn’t give up; learned from his mistakes, and went to work. Eight years later, he was elected President of the United States.
You don’t need me to tell you his name. I suppose some would say I have no right to say anything about African-American history, or the meaning of Black History month, because I am an old white guy. Well, I disagree with that. I see the effects of racism. This history is my history too. I know I am not likely to be pulled over if I drive slowly around the streets of Grosse Pointe.
Nobody would pay much attention to me if I go into a jewelry store at Somerset Mall this afternoon and start scrutinizing the diamonds, but if a black man my age did that, he’d likely feel the eyes of some suspicious employee scrutinizing him.
This is our legacy and our history, all of ours. We all have to live with it, and it doesn’t do any of us any good to be ignorant of it. No, I never owned a slave, or did any of my ancestors, so far as I know. But I have to admit that the legacy of slavery is why I am quite likely to be treated differently from a black guy by the cops.
That’s wrong, and unfair, and we need to try to fix it. That doesn’t mean every white person need to walk around crippled by guilt over the Dred Scott decision, nor does it mean black folks can blame racism for everything. Kwame Kilpatrick was not the victim of racism; he was and is the victim of Kwame Kilpatrick, a spoiled man-child who exploited poor black people.
But it does mean we have to be aware of the past. Fully aware. Many people know, or think they know, the story of Ossian Sweet, the black doctor whose family was attacked by a mob after he bought a home in a white section of Detroit. They fought to defend their house, a white man was killed, and he and several members of his family were tried for murder.
The NAACP brought in the great lawyer Clarence Darrow, he went to work, and in the end, none of the Sweet family was convicted of any crime.
Yet what you may not know is that the Sweet family’s lives were ruined. Dr. Sweet’s young wife had contracted tuberculosis while in a filthy jail, and she and their daughter Iva soon died of it. His brother died of TB too. Ossian Sweet’s life went downhill until one bleak day in early 1960, when in a lonely apartment over a drugstore, he put a bullet in his brain. He was murdered by racism just as surely and perhaps more cruelly than Martin Luther King.
Heroes often pay a terrible price. But, as Teddy Kennedy once said, “the cause endures, hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
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