Essay: The powers of Racial Example

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The ghost of Tiresias told Ulysses to carry an oar upon his shoulder and walk inland until he met a traveler who did not know what an oar was. Thus Ulysses, exhausted by the sea, would recognize that he was safely home.

Some day, possibly, the American racial odyssey will end, and racial hatred, like the oar, will be an item of bafflement and curiosity: What was the point of all that, anyway? Why was it so fierce, so enduring?

In recent months, the nation has taken a few steps on the inland march. Some of them were merely tokens of motion, but considered together, they amount at least to an interesting procession of symbols. The first black American astronaut went into space. For the first time a black was crowned Miss America. Blacks now are the mayors of four of the largest American cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit. Congress proclaimed a national holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr., and a conservative Republican President endorsed the idea.

And, in the most significant display, the first black presidential candidate (or the first with a serious following), King's disciple, Jesse Jackson, sits side by side in debate with the two white Senators running for the Democratic nomination. Whatever errors he has made elsewhere in the campaign (stupid, private references to Jews as "Hymie," his close relationship to a poisonous character who heads the Nation of Islam), Jackson has sometimes sounded in the debates like the only grownup in the race. In any case, the spectacle of a young black man treated equally with two whites in a fight for the most powerful office on earth would have been unthinkable in the U.S. a generation ago.

During the '70s, a powerful white politician in New York was discussing the realities of his trade. He shook his head in disgust. "Forget the black vote," he said. "Blacks don't vote." They do now, as New York discovered last week. George Wallace learned the lesson sometime earlier and later found himself out courting the blacks whom he had once symbolically blocked at the schoolhouse door.

It is fitting that Jackson should be the man to inspirit the black electorate. For years he has been the one black leader whose attention was focused clearly on the dramatic stage on which the last act of the American racial melodrama will eventually be enacted. That stage is located in the black mind.

The journey of American blacks has been a series of epic passages: the "Middle Passage" from Africa . . . the long passage through slavery to the Emancipation Proclamation . . . the false dawn of Reconstruction. . . the terrorist Klan era with its night-riding death squads . . . the passage north to South Side Chicago and Detroit and Harlem. . . then Brown vs. Topeka and desegregation and the Martin Luther King era and the Great Society. What is unfolding now may be thought of in years to come as the Jesse Jackson era for black America. Whatever Jackson's role in the journey, the ultimate passage to be accomplished is the internal passage, the psychological passage.