A crossing of paths - Studs Terkel and Barack Obama

Studs Terkel represented to me everything good about America. He was Chicago. How unfortunate that Studs did not see America do something distinctly American. Just when you count American's out and lose your hope in their decision making, they surprise you and do something as profound as elect a President of mixed race from a city that was an example of institutionalized racism and segregation. Studs loved Chicago. He openly criticized Chicago. He held Chicago accountable to his own high ideals of social justice.
Whereas Martin Luther King, Jr. had a profound effect on changing the south, his greatest challenge may have come when he moved to Chicago. He was met with fear that bred intense anger and violence. This was the time of block busting when real estate agents would start the rumor of a black family moving in to a neighborhood. People were warned not to be the last to sell or they would risk losing their main asset and financial security, their homes. Cities outlawed for sale signs in a futile attempt to stop the stampede to the suburbs and the resulting destruction of housing values and neighborhoods.
Mayor Richard J. Daley, the builder of the great concrete jungles such as the Robert Taylor homes and Cabrini Green, segregated, confined, and isolated the blacks by water and interstates. These housing projects fought for by the liberal elites largely became prisons, with the exception that prisons had heat, running water, and were much safer. Only now after the truncated ascendancy of Harold Washington and under an entirely different Mayor Daley blacks are now finding their strength and independence, only to be eclipsed by the rising Hispanic community and coming majority.
So how fitting it is then, that from the Land of Lincoln, and the City of big shoulders would we see the first mixed race president. I am proud of America. Studs is smiling, proud of his Chicago. His Chicago that is a good town. A tough town but a good town filled with good people. Studs you will be missed. President Obama you are assuming the helm at one of the more precarious times in American History, godspeed to you. At least in this most difficult of times, we have seen fit to pick our best and brightest. Let's protect him and support him as he finds his way in the most diffficult of all roles, leader of the world. Studs would have insisted upon it.