Burris has appeared in recent hours smiling with evident satisfaction in the company of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as that body prepares to welcome into its bosom the one Illinois politician shameless enough to ignore the ignomonious behavior of Governor Rod ‘Auctioneer’ Blagojevich. Burris’s contentment with the marvelousness of his selfsame person is similarly displayed in the adornments he has placed on the mausoleum readied for the reception of his earthly remains at Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago.
Burris, now 71 and thus perhaps increasingly conscious of the fleeting impermanence of this mortal coil, has had chiseled into granite his many ‘firsts’, as for example his accession to the post of attorney-general of Illinois, the first African-American in that state to do so. Happily, it is now also recorded for the ages that Mr Burris became the first African-American college student in world history to be exchanged between the Southern Illinois and Hamburg Universities in the Year of Our Lord 1959.
As Barack Obama travels down Pennsylvania Avenue in a limousine toward the White House surrounded with the trappings of state, many of us will recall that the distinguished yet (by current standards) modest mansion he will occupy as the symbolic incarnation of our body politic was constructed by slaves, men of flesh and blood owned by the structure’s designer. Owned just as many other human beings of dark complexion were owned by the first dozen presidents as a matter of course, sometimes while occupying the same domicile to be occupied by Obama and his family, who, had they been born earlier, would not even have had the right to remain together as such.
Obama, who joins the fourth dozen of presidents, promises to leave us with phrases of great moral and emotional moment. No adult of my generation, whose childhood and adolescence were marked with the cresting of the Second Reconstruction and the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., can remain indifferent to the social earthquake that we have engendered by electing him and how it speaks of the persistent dynamism of our nation despite the relentless decades of worship of ego, domination, clan and disdain for the weak. Obama’s personal story is transformational; his rhetoric appeals to a shared burden of error and a shared claim to the rewards of justice rediscovered.
Burris’s race story, on the other hand, is not personal but individual. He comes to us not a symbol of a changing society or the struggle of a people, but as a special person accomplishing special things. He joins a long line of others, like our former Mayor Dinkins who could never stop referring to himself as the ‘son of a postal worker’, the breathless Clarence Thomas when Bush the First lifted him out of obscurity into the Supreme Court, or our new state senate majority leader, Malcolm Smith, who promptly marvels at his rise from bicycle delivery boy to a grand job in Albany.
Burris, Dinkins, Smith, Thomas—although they would not exist without the movements that propelled them into prominence, their clamor is less of the barriers removed and the implications of that removal for their peers than for themselves as wondrous spirits. They speak as self-made Horatio Algers, Americans to the bone, rugged individuals who knew how to make it in tough times and get ahead despite all obstacles.
It is good to be reminded simultaneously of these two visions in the persons of Burris and Obama as these are nothing more than the options we all have as we consider our good fortune, either as a mark of the favor of God on our now-apparent fabulousness or, alternatively, as doors that open to us opportunities to serve others and make the world a better place.
On January 20 Obama rises as the cleanest expression of the latter we have had in many years. No matter what happens in the next four, I will be proud to take possession of that day as my own day and of his vision as my own vision.
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