The Gift of Hope
The author’s cynicism about race in America took a sharp
turn after the presidential election—and for that, he gives
a nod to his daughter By ROGER WILKINS
Elizabeth had just finished run-
ning the Michigan field operation for
Barack Obama’s general-election cam-
paign, and she and her colleagues had
done their work well: Senator John
McCain had pulled his forces out of
Michigan early, and Obama had won
the state by 16 points and then gone on
to pull off the most astonishing presi-
dential victory of my lifetime. Friends
Hall and asked: “What have you made for us in there, Dr. Franklin?”
“A Republic, Madam, if you
can keep it,” Franklin replied.
I thought about that exchange
shortly after last November’s
presidential election as I was
driving my daughter Elizabeth
home to Washington, D.C.,
from Detroit.
quickly began asking Elizabeth what
she was going to do next, and like most
of her colleagues who had been aver-
aging about four hours of sleep a night
for months, she always gave the same
answer: “I’m going to sleep.”
Elizabeth did sleep as I drove up and
around the mountains and through
the tunnels of western Pennsylvania
that I had loved on excursions during
my student days in Ann Arbor, Michi-
gan. I was now the 76-year-old father
of the 25-year-old child of a second
marriage, and glancing at this attrac-
tive, brown woman with the well-
tended dreadlocks, I was struck by two
things: how alike we are, but also how
differently we’ve sometimes viewed
GENERA TION YES
Barack Obama’s historic
appeal across racial lines
energized the youth vote.
this republic and the citizens Ben
Franklin hoped would keep it intact.
We had certainly differed about
Obama. Both of us wanted the 2008
election to bring change to the nation—
to make a more perfect union for the
many Americans who suffer injustice,
poverty, and despair. But when the
prospect of Obama was put before us,
our divergent life stories stirred responses that clashed.
I had been born in a segregated
hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, in
1932 and began my education in a segregated one-room schoolhouse. A year
later I was bused across town, past
sparkling, new schools for whites, to a
worn-down school reserved for blacks.
