ELECTION 2008: The Challenge of Change
Race
A personal essay by Natasha Trethewey
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, an Emory University professor, considers the election of America’s first biracial president in terms of her own mixed background. Her poem below imagines her pregnant mother in the Deep South contemplating her unborn child’s uncertain future.
A few years ago, when I was working on the poem, “My Mother Dreams Another Country,” I was compelled to consider what my mother must have been thinking —- in 1966 —- about the biracial child she and my father were bringing into the world. The year before, my parents had broken two laws of the state of Mississippi by traveling to Ohio to marry and then returning to my mother’s home state. It was just after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but still before the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. State of Virginia in which state anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional. And it was years before those unconstitutional state laws were no longer enforced —- by custom, by intimidation, and by other deterrents imposed upon couples seeking marriage licenses. Barack Obama was just 5 years old when my mother was contemplating another country —- another America —- in which interracial marriage would be legal in the entire country. In 1961, when Obama was born, 21 states still had laws forbidding the marriage of his parents —- of blacks to whites.
Read the entire essay here:
http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2008/11/09/trethewey.html
Listen to Natasha read the essay here:
http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2008/11/09/trethewey.html#
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