For many, nomination is a dream fulfilled

Erika George's mother had scars on her legs until the day she died. They came from a beating she endured from a Louisiana mob angered because she was playing at a "whites only" playground. She was black.

Now George, as a Utah alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention that begins Monday, will participate in something that her mother could never have imagined — the expected nomination of Barack Obama, a black man, to be the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party.

"I do find myself wondering if she could have imagined the world today, one that she and others like her worked to realize," said George, now a law professor at the University of Utah.

As a black woman, she said, "The past civil rights work has made me, a professor, and Obama, a senator, imaginable ... It is my hope that we have progressed to a point where the American people will understand that a person of color can be a leader for all people in the nation."

Obama is set to accept the nomination on Thursday —45 years to the day after Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous "I have a dream" speech. In it, he said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Utah's delegates to the convention join in seeing Obama's nomination as a milestone in the long push for racial equality — and it is especially meaningful for many of those delegates who are minorities.

Like Obama, delegate Theodore Cowan Jr., 25, secretary of the grassroots Utah for Obama group, has a mixed racial heritage, half black and half white.

He said, "The significance of the first half-black president may be lost on me because of my younger age. (But) I see it as a transformation of our political culture."

Cowan said that when he was a youngster in West Jordan, his family had a few problems from a lingering remnant of the Ku Klux Klan in the area, and he experienced a few problems from other youths. But he said, "Altogether, I think Utah is the most racially tolerant state I've ever been in."

Still, he revels in the now-national progress shown by Obama's nomination.

Josie Valdez, a Hispanic delegate who is also the Democratic nominee for Utah's lieutenant governor, said, "This is exciting. It means that America is the land of opportunity for all people, regardless of color or race."

She adds, "It means that we are progressing, not that people of color 'have made it,' but that we are moving forward in our quest for freedom and access to opportunity."