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Politics aside...

All right, it's over, thank goodness. Three hundred eighty-nine years after the first blacks were brought into this land in bondage, Barack Obama will be the next president.

And if you didn't grow up during a particularly grim time, especially in the South, you may be missing the historical importance of what happened this week.

It's one thing to talk about Lincoln and Dr. King, it's another to have grown up when the latter was alive and active and had a dream and wrote his letter from the Birmingham jail.

Lost in the uproar the other night was the real, dreadful history of that time, and I'll bet there weren't a lot of people eager to go in and drag it back out into the open.

There were so many murders and burnings and bombings and just so much hate -- so much casual hate dripping that was expressed so matter of factly, like we're in this together, right, y'all?

Yes, there was dislike and distrust of blacks in Dorchester and Newark and Philly and even Vegas. But that was largely an urban thing, and the good folks in places like Ottumwa and Amherst and Bishop could look at things with unknowing, ignorant smiles.

But in the South the hate was rampant, and there were only a few places that were unaffected by it, and Mississippi was Hate Central, the final pit, the Closed Society, and in the early 1960s the state was virtually ready to start open war with the federal government to preserve its racist conceits.

In Alabama, Birmingham was "Bombing-ham," but there were also the little rural wooded lanes where families and congregations were burned out or men were strung up miles away from anything like an urban ghetto, where blacks like Emmett Till were anchored to a boat motor and tossed into the nearest river.

In 1966 when the Klan was at its height, a friend and I attended a KKK rally in Raleigh in order to bear witness.

Outside the blacks understood what a joke the Klan was, and I watched as one pulled out his cigarette lighter and pretended to ignite the Confederate flag a klansman carried over his shoulder.

Inside the auditorium, when the national anthem was played, we stood along with everyone else. Then they played "Dixie" and we sat down while everyone else stood. We looked at each other nervously but remained seated. I think it may have been the first time I did something that actually took a little courage; if looks alone could kill, we would have gone out of there in a basket.

(That was the year I noticed a simple button from Alabama at the Newport, R.I., Folk Festival -- it showed a large black cat with the simple words, "Lowndes County" -- the Lowndes County Freedom Organization's symbol became that of the Black Panther Party.)

Two years earlier we had watched the Klan march through Durham and distribute some of the most goofy drivel ever, depressing silliness that "proved" blacks were racially inferior.

The robed klansmen were protected by helmeted "security officers" who mostly appeared deranged, and even the black kids were not impressed.

Did the racist whites really live in a world so limited that they just didn't get it?

That night about 200 klansmen lit a cross north of town and were outnumbered by about 1,000 heckling students from Duke and UNC. In keeping with the Klan's fatuous style, the wind was high and one side of the cross-piece wouldn't light, but there was no mistaking the hatred in references to "Martin Luther Coon" and suchlike.

The hoods and the overt violence slowly disappeared, and years later -- just recently, really -- federal and state governments began making efforts to bring some of the criminals to justice. The old-line seggies like Wallace and Thurmond, Maddox and Hebert (successors of the Talmadges and the Bilbos) died off, and I remember watching TV one night and seeing a black reporter interviewing the mayor of Philadelphia, Miss.

Twenty years before he might have been beaten for having the temerity to demand answers of a white man while the FBI looked for three dead civil rights workers, but now the major was all hearts and flowers and respect.

It was about time.

Slowly things changed, but historically they had performed a nearly complete turnaround in just the years of my own life -- from being born the same year the Dixiecrats bolted the Democratic Party to Obama being selected as the same party's standard bearer and the nation's president-elect.

Politics aside...

The country marched forward in seven-league boots the other night and finally fulfilled the promises it had made.