This year's election victory should be about race

They said that this presidential contest was not at all about race, but I say the victory should be. The exact moment the polls were closed on the West Coast the national networks projected Sen. Barack Hussein Obama had won enough electoral votes to be the next president of the United States. The cameras then panned the throng in Grant Park in Chicago capturing the tearful eyes of the thousands celebrating that unprecedented night, and commentators began asking anyone of color their feelings about the historic moment. The thrill was palpable.

Obama is the first African-American president-elect, yet his story is not the same as others of his race who came before or those cheering in the park. His fifth great-grandfather was not captured and dragged from his village then chained in some hellhole of a slave ship. His personal forbearers did not endure the humility of the marketplace, the selling of children from their parents, the brutal whipping or sexual exploitation by owners that is part of the history of other blacks in America. He did not grow up in the projects or attend schools where the students struggle to read or to have enough food in their stomachs so they can think clearly before their internal glucose runs out. His heritage did not run through Roots, for he is a real African, a Kenyan-American born to a white mother in Hawaii.

Still I have to admit I was one of many Americans and others around the world, especially the struggling people of Africa, who shed a few tears over Obama's historic symbolic triumph. My moist eyes were not for policy or party. It was not for his win per se or for the defeat of another. They were as much for my junior varsity basketball coach as for the candidate.

Willie Peete was a black man and an assistant coach at Westwood High School in Mesa, Ariz. He was my coach during the time people of the color of his skin were fire-hosed or terrified by snarling dogs in Mississippi and Alabama. Coach Peete represented to me the black and white images I saw from the nightly news of David Brinkley and Chet Huntley or from pages of Life and Look magazines.

My family had traveled by car from Mesa to New York for the World's Fair. We journeyed through the Jim Crow South seeing New Orleans and then up through other segregated states. As a stranger in this strange land I distinctly recall the three restrooms at gas stations. There was one clearly labeled for men, a second for women and a third for colored. There were also special plumbing features to their drinking fountains. They had their water spigot for "Whites Only" and jerry-rigged from that was another one for the colored folks. As a striking contrast our vacation also included battlefields and historical sites of the Civil War, Vicksberg, Lincoln's Memorial and Ford's theater.