change, Mr. J.

[calimac]

The inaugural souvenir issue of Newsweek informed me of something I had not known. An essay by Henry Louis Gates Jr. cites a 1958 article by Jacob Javits, who had just been elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, predicting the election of a black U.S. president in the year 2000. It turns out to be online, with footnotes.

A pretty good prediction, especially considering the description of this future candidate: "Undoubtedly, he will be well-educated. He will be well-traveled and have a keen grasp of his country's role in the world and its relationships. He will be a dedicated internationalist ..." Even without the foreign-service background that Javits expects [he's thinking of Ralph Bunche, really], that portrait fits. The President came by his internationalism in a different manner, and the date is a little off, that's all.

Elsewhere in the article, Javits even gets the date right too in such dead-on descriptions of stages on the way as "it will be possible to name a Negro to the U.S. Supreme Court Bench in about ten years, and that at the same time we may have the first Negro since Reconstruction days sitting in the U.S. Senate," both of which turned out to be exactly correct. So much so, in fact, that the article is more eye-opening today in showing how long ago 1958 was than in how far we've come since then. Javits's marvels are unremarkable today; what's remarkable is that they once were considered marvels.

All right, racism isn't gone: far from it. But what is gone is the kind of blanket all-encompassing racism that would once have prevented Obama (or Eric Holder, or Colin Powell, or Condi Rice) from reaching their distinguished positions no matter how good they were.

With that in mind, there's a photo in the same issue of Newsweek that I'd like to send back fifty years through a wormhole in time for Mr. Javits to see. It was taken immediately in front of the stand from the right-hand side, and the scene of two men with their right hands raised, one man in judge's robes and the other with his left hand resting on an old book, conveyed the same meaning then as it does now even without recognizing the persons involved: it's the inauguration of a President.

Perfectly normal; nothing has changed. Except that the President is black. Javits was right.

In those days it was not yet the custom for the First Lady to hold the Bible, but I think the 1958 viewer could guess who that must be too.

One other thing they couldn't guess in 1958 from just looking at the picture, so I'd have to tell them. There's a lot of other people in the photo. One of them, immediately behind the First Lady, is a short white woman in a big blue coat.

You know who she is, Mr. Javits? She's the Speaker of the House. How about that?

It's worth remembering that in 1958 the Speaker of the House was an old bald guy from Texas who looked like this (I think you can all recognize the other man in the photo and judge the significance of what he's doing), and most of his recent predecessors weren't much different. So things have changed a little on more than one front.

Comments

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

Javits as Hari Seldon?
I like it!