Today our newly minted President-Elect Obama goes to the White House to meet with the current President. Yes, we all know what that conventionally means-the transition of power. The current president will share advice, policy narrative and maybe even the secret location of the wall safe. This symbolic ritual of greeting brings many emotions.JFK was supposedly giddy when shown the panic button to summon a helicopter. Who really knows what will thrill Obama today. Bush will probably get lost on the tour and choke on a pretzel.
The First ladies will also meet today. Mrs. Obama will probably discuss the drapes and the Lincoln bedroom with Mrs. Bush. If the conversation evolves past idle chit chat and bond of trust develops maybe they will discuss the impending family decisions that face the Obamas personally, such as the puppy and school selection. In the midst of the war stories of motherhood and how the life at 1600 Pennsylvania changes the normal experiences many people will be watching within the hallowed halls of that home.
What the heck am I talking about? After the jump...
Today the Obama's will walk into the White House through the front door. With the press at their heels and the American public eager to have them begin their new roles.
While all this occurs a man who has stood at that door will reminisce and shed a tear of delight.
What am I talking about? Probably something the Palin Klan will never understand but if you read this article it will put today in perspective as it did for me once again.
To read this man's story is to remember why we should always have faith in our country or in the very least our fellow man.
I hope President and Mrs. Obama invite him once again for dinner as a guest. They should be so honored IMO.
Link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Excerpts:
For more than three decades Eugene Allen worked in the White House, a black man unknown to the headlines. During some of those years, harsh segregation laws lay upon the land.
He trekked home every night, his wife, Helene, keeping him out of her kitchen.
At the White House, he worked closer to the dirty dishes than to the large desk in the Oval Office. Helene didn't care; she just beamed with pride.
President Truman called him Gene.
President Ford liked to talk golf with him.
He saw eight presidential administrations come and go, often working six days a week. "I never missed a day of work," Allen says.
His is a story from the back pages of history. A figure in the tiniest of print. The man in the kitchen.
In 1866 the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, sensing an opening to advocate for black voting rights, made a White House visit to lobby President Andrew Johnson. Johnson refused to engage in a struggle for black voting rights. Douglass was back at the White House in 1877. But no one wished to discuss his political sentiments: President Rutherford Hayes had engaged the great man -- it was a time of high minstrelsy across the nation -- to serve as a master of ceremonies for an evening of entertainment.
In the fall of 1901, another famous black American came to the door. President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute, to meet with him at the White House. Roosevelt was careful not to announce the invitation, fearing a backlash, especially from Southerners. But news of the visit leaked quickly enough and the uproar was swift and noisy. In an editorial, the Memphis Scimitar would write in the ugly language of the times: "It is only recently that President Roosevelt boasted that his mother was a Southern woman, and that he is half Southern by reason of that fact. By inviting a ****** to his table he pays his mother small duty."
Fifty years later, invitations to the White House were still fraught with racial subtext. When the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow pianist Hazel Scott to perform at Constitution Hall because of her race, many letters poured into the White House decrying the DAR's position. First lady Bess Truman was a member of the organization, but she made no effort to get the DAR to alter its policy. Scott's husband, Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell, subsequently referred to Bess Truman as "the last lady of the land." The words outraged President Truman, who vowed to aides he would find some way to punish Powell and barred the fellow Democrat from setting foot inside the Truman White House.
The butler remembers seeing both Powell and Rice in the Oval Office. He was serving refreshments. He couldn't help notice that blacks were moving closer to the center of power, closer than he could ever have dreamed. He'd tell Helene how proud it made him feel.
The butler cast his vote for Obama on Tuesday. He so missed telling his Helene about the black man bound for the Oval Office.
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