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Witnessing the Inauguration With the 2nd Grade

Submitted by acorcoran on Thu, 01/22/2009 - 15:59.

I just returned to my office after watching the inauguration of Barak Obama with the second grade. I find myself wondering what it meant to them.

I hope that at least a few of them remember sitting together in room 262 with their classmates watching this historic event together. They listened quietly (for the most part), standing when Senator Feinstein asked those present to stand for the oaths of office and applauding along with the crowds on the television. Teacher Winnie Mu gave an intermittent commentary to let the students know why some things were happening. The students laughed at some of the crowd shots as only second graders can but for the most part they watched and listened.

For a few years in my youth I lived in the south, then the land of separate water fountains and schools. Even as a boy I remember the how strange it was to see drinking fountains labeled 'colored' and 'white'. In the summer heat of Georgia it was clear that only white water fountains had coolers, only the white waiting rooms at the Trailways bus station had fans or air conditioning. My school had one student we would now refer to as a 'person of color', a Chinese girl named Ann Joe. Shortly after arriving in Augusta as a boy, I did not understand why I could not give my seat at the Five and Dime lunch counter to an elderly woman standing behind me. It soon became clear that the price of a seat was the color of your skin. I wonder if our students realize how recently those things happened.

Four years later we moved to Hawaii and I heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in person when he spoke at the University of Hawaii. I still remember the two mile walk back to my high school. I remember saying to one of my classmates, 'If he were white he would be president.' Finally, forty five years later, the first four words of that statement are obsolete.

The world of these second graders is much different from the one I grew up in. I wonder what changes they will see in their lifetimes. I wonder if one of them will stand behind some children in the midst of a monumental point in history and think back to how much has changed since they were children.