The Heroes Who Paved Obama's Road

I was in downtown Washington when Barack Obama was declared president-elect. Jubilant crowds of all races fell into the streets, celebrating with raucous joy. Inexplicably, I was numb, reserved. When I got home, I turned on the television and saw Jesse Jackson break down in tears. That's when I also broke down.

My memory drifted back to my childhood during the civil rights era, when my stepfather had a position as an associate professor at Washington College in Chestertown on the Eastern Shore. Then, Maryland's Eastern Shore was no different from the Deep South. The schools and public accommodations were segregated. White working-class people lived in tidy clapboard houses on side streets. White middle-class professionals lived in Victorian homes on the main thoroughfares. The poorest whites lived in trailers on the outskirts of town. And black people lived in a shantytown with no paved streets, and with outhouses and open garbage pits that smoldered with black smoke.

As we drove from New York, my stepfather, a civil rights activist, warned me not to adopt the racist norms of white children with whom I would attend school. My mother, who was born in Beijing, said he needn't worry that I was neither white nor black.

She turned to me and said, "Son, you are Chinese, born in America."

But being Chinese presented a quandary for the segregated school system: Would I go to a white or a black school? The school board ruled that because my stepfather was white and a professor at Washington College, I was to attend a white school. It denied my stepfather's request that I attend the white school one semester and the Negro school, as it was called then, the next semester.

That year, in sixth grade, I made friends with kids who didn't seem to notice or care that I was the only student of color. I thought my stepfather was imagining things or exaggerating until one day in music class we were to sing "Mammy's Little Babies Love Shortening Bread." The boys all sang "Mammy's little niggers love shortening bread," while the girls laughed. It was clear I was no longer in New York.

Later, two schoolmates and I happened to be walking through the shantytown when a black boy stepped in front of us.

"My name is Bill and I live here," he said.

He asked what we "white boys" were doing there and, when told we were walking through, said that we would have to walk around "on your side of town."

"What if we don't want to?"

Bill pointed at each of the white boys and said, "Then, I'll fight you. Or I'll fight you."

Then he pointed at me and said, "Or I'll fight you."