SITTING in front of the screeching, jabbering television screen in my daughter’s New York apartment on American presidential election night last week, I couldn’t help remembering two experiences from my first stay in the Big Apple exactly 50 years earlier. The first concerned my office in the Rockefeller Centre, which – like all newspaper offices – generated a great deal of waste paper.
The vast bins of discarded newspapers and screwed-up ticker tape were emptied by one of the most memorable characters I encountered during my spell as a reporter in New York.
His name was Clarence, he was in his late 50s, he
was sparklingly intelligent and he was also immensely funny as only New Yorkers can be. His daily visits to our big, one-roomed office were one of the high spots of our day.
It soon became clear to me that behind that chatterbox wit lay a much more complex and melancholy human being. For Clarence was black and he was acutely aware that, just two generations away from slavery, he was a second-class citizen in what was supposed to be his native country.
He knew he was cleverer than most of the people whose rubbish he carted away. But he also knew he would never be able to improve his lot. So he had concentrated his whole life on saving enough money to send his son to law school in order to make sure that he, at least, would be able to claw his way out of the Harlem ghetto in which Clarence had been condemned to spent his whole life.
Clarence is, no doubt, long dead now. But I hope his son fulfilled his father’s ambitions and that he lived to see the extraordinary event which took place around
11pm New York time on November 4 2008. It was what Clarence had been waiting for.
The second experience that rose up in my memory on that amazing night took place, not in New York but in Tallahassee, the state capital of Florida.
Situated in the so-called panhandle of Florida, which stretches into the next-door state of Georgia, Tallahassee is much more like a Georgian town than it is like the Florida of Miami, Palm Beach and Disneyland. Not only does it have moss-festooned oak trees lining its streets, like a scene from Gone With the Wind; it also has a similar racial history
I was sent down there from the New York bureau to cover a rape trial. It was a brutal gang rape by five white boys on a woman student at Tallahassee’s black university. The case had attracted huge attention, not only in America but also in the rest of the world.
So I was not the only reporter at the press table who came from outside Florida when the judge opened the trial with some electrifying remarks.
Just 20 years earlier, he told us, there has been a similar trial in this very same courtroom. But the judge on that occasion had opened the proceedings by saying that as far as he was concerned there was no such crime as rape where a black woman was involved. “This time”, said the new judge, “things are going to be different. These white boys are going to get a fair trial, neither more nor less.”
And that is exactly what he gave them, and at the end they were convicted and sentenced to a very long prison term. It was, in that place and at that time, a giant stride for humanity.
I hope the woman in the case lived to see what happened on Tuesday November 4 2008. It might have helped heal the mental wounds of 1959. Nothing, alas, was going to help the woman in the earlier trial.
In passing, it is worth mentioning that the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, or NAACP, disgraced itself in the eyes of liberal opinion by issuing a statement after the trial saying that a mere prison sentence was not good enough and that the boys should have been sentenced to death.
As the NAACP pointed out – probably accurately – that would have been the penalty if they had been black. But we liberals didn’t like it.
So you can see that, in common with most other television watchers, I was in a highly emotional state last Tuesday night and it was one which was only partially attributable to my son-in-law’s excellent champagne.
However, just in case we got too carried away with our own euphoria, Wall Street stepped in next morning bright and early with a brutal reminder of the realities which will face the President-elect when George Bush and his ghastly crew are finally cleared out of the White House next January.
Share prices were still falling, with barely a nod to what had happened at the polling booths the previous day.
But Americans, thank God, are amazingly optimistic people and the most encouraging remark about the future of Barack Obama’s presidency came from the very tough cookie Obama has chosen as his chief of staff.
Rahm Emanuel – already dubbed Rahmbo by admirers and critics alike – said of the present situation: “You don’t ever want to let a crisis go to waste.”
I take that to mean that the economic crisis, far from inhibiting Obama’s room for radical action, will actually be used to secure public support for really fundamental changes in America’s economic and social structure.
He seems to have learned the lesson of Franklin D Roosevelt’s first two terms immediately after the 1929 crash – which, contrary to popular mythology, is not that he did too much too soon, but that he didn’t do enough soon enough.
As the New York Times put it on Monday this week: “Mr Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold. Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity.”
To which Clarence would have remarked: “Yeah, man!”
