Think of the election of an African American, Barack Obama, as President of the United States as if it were a water fountain being turned on after years of rusting neglect. With great anticipation, people of all ages and backgrounds are lining up to drink from that fountain — wanting to express their views and give their reactions to this historic milestone. Needing to say something, like they were desperate to quench a persistent, unquenchable thirst.

More than anything, the thirst people seem most eager to satisfy has to do with their feelings about race.

Long a forbidden, awkward topic and a discussion to be avoided at all costs, race is now emerging into the foreground of the national dialogue as the Obama Administration takes office. It is, for many, the subtext underlying the complex and challenging economic, foreign policy, environmental and military issues the new President will face on January 20. Is he up to the task? Can an African American persuade the doubters and the fearful that he can lead the nation? Will he be able to manage what is looking more and more to be outsized expectations of change in race relations.

It doesn’t appear that any real consensus has yet evolved. But there is this to be said: Obama’s candidacy and election has brought the issue of American race relations more out in the open than probably at any time in our history. What’s more, most people seem to think that talking about race is a good thing. After more than two centuries of struggling with slavery, segregation and discrimination, and never or not quite coming to grips with it, the mood of Americans is one of cautious optimism that Obama’s election means that the nation has finally — belatedly to be sure — come to grips with the baleful, racist actions of the past. In Barack Obama’s election, we seem to be assuring each other,  America can put all that sorry history away — not forgetting about it, but focusing, as Obama seems intent on doing, on a future in which the “better angels of our nature” burst forth in resplendent triumph.

This is, undoubtedly, an upbeat vision, which in quite obvious ways is out of sync with the prevailing gloom of the economic downturn.  But the optimism is palpable. That’s especially true for many older African Americans, the men and women who suffered through the worst years of segregation and social injustice and saw or experienced first hand, like the slap on the face, the brutal force of prejudice. For this generation, there is hope that the Obama phenomenon will usher in a new commitment to recognition and reconciliation, in the law, in the marketplace, and in the hearts of the white majority that racism is — if not dead — then on its way into history’s dustbin, at last.

One of the members of this generation of African Americans is the Freedom Center’s Senior Adviser, Carl Westmoreland.  He’s seen much in his life to give him pause that things have really changed, even with Obama’s election.  But Carl’s strong sense of the currents of history also give him a valuable perspective — at a visceral, personal level — of all that has gone before for people of color in America.

He had the opportunity recently to gather his thoughts after a young Kentucky high school student had written to him about a research paper she was preparing. The subject of the paper: “How much progress has been made since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s?” Carl’s answers are his own and do not reflect an official position of the Freedom Center. They do reflect our desire to inspire dialogue about race — to persuade people, as it were, to drink from the fountain — and thus achieve a level of understanding and acceptance that is the promise of the coming years under new national leadership.

Q. What was it like for a young black man during the Civil Rights movement?
I grew up in Lincoln Heights, Ohio in American Apartheid, a system of racial separation that existed in various forms North, East, South, and West. In Cincinnati I watched my father and other black men picket the stores of Lockland, Ohio because black people could not eat in the local restaurants. As the only boy of African descent in the 8th grade at Woodlawn Elementary School my classmates, 90% of whom were white, elected me class president and the school principal refused to acknowledge my election until my white classmates protested directly to him. A fishing trip through Kentucky required that we go to the bathroom before we left home, drink no liquid while we were on the road, and go to the bathroom when we got to the “Negro” section of Lexington and Richmond. If you had needed to go before you reached a place of safety, and dignity (male, female) were forced to find primitive privacy by the side of the road while white America whizzed by. At Knoxville College, as a senior in 1960, our school president was able to arrange for those of us enrolled in an honors history class to use the library at the University of Tennessee after the library closed at night and the janitors were cleaning so the white students could be comfortable the next day (social contact, educational contact between whites and blacks was an exception, and in most cases was frowned on). Five months after the president of our college secured this opportunity for us to use the library at the University of Tennessee, Dr. Martin Luther King spoke at our graduation at which time he echoed the challenge to us that most of us heard at church, at the dinner table, and from the army of black teachers and community leaders who came into our lives saying, “you must help someone stand on your shoulders just as you are standing on the shoulders of those who picked cotton, scrubbed floors, or worked at the furnace at the foundry so you could stand here today in dignity.”

Q. What can you to today that you could not do as a young man?
For the most part (starting in the 1960s) I can go to the bathroom when I need to, I have been allowed by America to make maximum use of my intellect, and my work ethic to achieve most of the thing I have pursued in my profession. I have represented America in Europe and Asia as an expert on historic preservation and urban issues. I am curator of an exhibit here at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center that is the largest of its kind in the Americas. I have been privileged to write and speak all over the world. There have been significant changes for me personally, fed by the gift of education of which I have been a recipient. However, education has been a blessing too often denied to too many black people who were not fortunate enough to go to school and receive the tools that allowed them to fly as high as their imagination allows. The rising cost of education (beyond high school) is beginning to limit educational opportunity for too many people in our society regardless of color.

Q. As an African American, what did it mean to you when Barack Obama won the Presidential election, being the first African American to do so?
My reaction to the election of Senator Obama is tempered by the history of Dr. Ralph Bunche being appointed to the United Nations in the 1950s, while at the same time millions of black people could not vote in the South. In addition I have lived through the era of Joe Louis (the great heavyweight boxer of the 1940s), Jackie Robinson (the first black man in modern history to play major league baseball in America) and countless other black people who have made individual contributions to a society that has been slow to change. These individuals are to be admired, but there is a “mountain” of work yet to be done in the area of human rights in America. In short, I don’t believe much will change with the election of Mr. Obama. As President he becomes the symbolic head of our government, but his ability to make positive changes for the community in which I live will be limited.

Q. There has been a rise of discrimination against immigrants from Mexico, and a rise in discrimination against people from the Middle East due to the war on terror and 9/11. Do you believe these people are discriminated against more than African Americans?
The Spanish-speaking immigration problem in the United States is a complicated one. Many American companies and many Americans seek out Mexicans and Latino people as a source of cheap labor to do many of the unpleasant tasks that were done in the past by black people and poor whites. The immigration problem is one that has been created by American agricultural, business interests, and the public. The worker has broken the law in an effort to find work in this imperfect place we know as America. As I write this response newspapers in places like Beaufort, South Carolina are running ads for farm laborers as the labor pool declines due to stricter immigration enforcement.

I invite you to do some research on the Mexican war of the late 1840s after which America took more than 50% of Mexico’s landmass; California, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico were among the states the United States of America took away from people we now call illegals. I would suggest we (the U.S.) develop a more humanitarian immigration policy with Mexico that takes the history of the two countries into consideration. With debate, discussion, and honest dialogue, as well as a willingness on the part of all concerned to compromise, Mexico and the United States could stop using the difference of language and race as an excuse to discriminate against anyone who is different.

Discrimination against Middle Eastern people is again rooted in a complicated history precipitated by the imperial aggression of the Crusades against the Muslim World who we (the Western European Powers) described as “Infidels.” The European powers dominated that part of the world off and on in the 1200s until after World War II when the United States of America replaced Europe as the dominant power in the military and the commercial world. As America’s domestic oil supply declined America’s power began to exert itself in ways that left many ordinary Muslim people bitter and angry as they watched significant amounts of their oil go to the West. Some people see 9/11 as the result of the accumulated history of heavy-handed western commercial activity and racist behaviors on the part of Americans toward people from the Middle East. The actions of the 10 violent men who were directly involved in 9/11 were were the exception to the hundreds of millions of Muslim people who practice their faith in a passive way, just as the ugly Crusades were not reflective of the mass of the European population at that time, most of whom struggled to secure a meager piece of bread for the next day.

Q. Do you think discrimination will ever go away?
In the history of the world since the beginning of time, men and women on every continent have used tribal warfare as a tool to gain more land and more wealth. Each society in Africa, Asia, Europe, and America has used the losers of tribal warfare as a source of free labor. The use of free labor enables the user of labor to enhance his or her profit margin to the maximum. Only in America starting with the Slave Laws of Virginia, Massachusetts, and Maryland did a society (country) use color as a permanent mark, as a “brand”, as a signal to the world that off white, beige, brown, and black skin was a sign of innate inferiority; the mark of a “slave.” The slave codes of the original 13 states provided a legal basis for the day to day social, political, and discriminatory practices that continue in America in overt and subtle ways. The negative definition of the world black — the exact opposite of white — has created a fertile field for the elevation of those in western society who are white, and even when it is unspoken in America, social practice defines non-whites as inferior.

Black people, Mexican people, Muslim people, Asian people, the Irish, the Italians, the Germans and the Polish have all suffered from discrimination in America as the result of being different; different race, different religion, or different tribe. Will racism end? It will end when the religious leaders, the scholars, the civic leader and the political leader, and our parents teach us that being different is being unique, being unique is being special, being special is in a world seeking to become better.