This One's For You, Joe & Jane

My father and mother were the blackest white people whom I have ever known. What I mean by that is that not only were some of their best friends Negroes, to use the painfully archaic cliche of their day, they talked the talk and they walked the walk as civil-rights activists. But despite being optimistic about most things they were unable to imagine the day that a black person could become president of the United States.

Joe and Jane Mullen were never denied a hotel room or turned away at a lunch counter, but both had been the victims of prejudice and that made their commitment to social justice and deep feelings for the disenfranchised all the more real.

My father's parents were immigrants. He grew up in grinding poverty and was taunted for his ratty clothes, Irish lineage and Catholicism.

My mother's father was a German Jew who arrived in America with 12 cents in his pocket and her mother an Anglican from an old Philadelphia family.

She felt the prejudice that her father experienced, and in a coup de grâce administered by a Catholic Church steeped in its own special brand of prejudice, she and my father had to be married in a sub assistant priest's vestry office and not a church because . . . well, you know, that Jewish problem.

I will never forget my father, by then very much a lapsed Catholic, telling me after returning home from Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Had a Dream" speech in Washington, that he had felt a kinship and spirituality that day unlike anything he had ever felt in church.

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Public schools in my Delaware native were among the last in the North to be desegregated, and the integration of the dirt-poor black district into our fairly affluent lily-white district was wrenching.

When our letter carrier became the first black to run for a seat on the consolidated school board, he was unable to find anyone with the experience to run his campaign until my father volunteered. He won, but my parents lost some so-called good friends and my siblings and I the companionship of the kids next door, whose mother forbade them to associate with us because our family not only consorted with blacks but allowed them to swim in our backyard pool.

Joe and Jane loved their country, but neither slavishly nor unconditionally.

They bristled at the superficial exhortations to patriotism of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. George Bush and Dick Cheney would have enraged them, and they would be saddened by the knowledge that with the emergence of Obama and other black public officials that politicians and pundits play the race card, and that hate mongers are making their presence known this fall at McCain and Palin campaign events.

My parents were proud of my Army service, but detested the Vietnam war (and went to antiwar protests, too.) They were law abiding, but my father became bitter that his government considered he and his children to be criminals because they provided him with marijuana cigarettes to ease the crippling nausea and pain of the primitive cancer treatments that did as much to kill him 27 years ago as the cigarettes he had smoked since his early teens.

My mother, stricken with a palsy that robbed her of her body but not her keen mind, passed on 8 years ago after being bedridden for many months. But she watched the Sunday morning news shows to the very end, invariably disparaging the panelists on "Meet the Press" as "a bunch of stuffed shirt white guys." (Not much has changed, eh?)

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Had they lived, Joe and Jane would have known exactly what Michelle Obama meant last spring when she said that she felt proud of America for the first time in her adult life. They also would have understood why such a heartfelt comment would be so widely disparaged and intentionally misinterpreted by lapel-pin patriots.

And beyond its sheer drama, this historic election would have been as deeply emotional for them as it has been for me.

I teared up the night that Barack Obama clinched the nomination, during his acceptance speech and when Obama first introduced Joe Biden, whose parents Jane and Joe not only knew but admired for their blue-collar work ethic and own deeply held principles.

Mind you, these are tears of joy leavened with some apprehension.

These tears are shed with the knowledge that six years before Obama was born, Rosa Parks refused to move after she was ordered to get out of her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, because of the color of her skin. And that today a man of color -- the embodiment of the dream that Martin Luther King shared with my parents and hundreds of thousand of other true believers in Washington on that day in 1963 -- stands on the threshold of the presidency.

This one's for you, Joe and Jane.