The winter clouds hung low over West Seventh Street as I walked down it today. Thick and bubbly, they cast a shadow of ice and cold yet to come which made me want to seek comfort in the Mad Hatter Café as quickly as I could get there. Before I could sprint inside, a new moment arrived, a glimmer of hope in the form of a thin ray of sun between the clouds. It was a “glory”, a ray of inspiration that only lasted a moment.

I paused to consider what this moment put into my mind. I wanted to know what inspiration would come in this vision apart from winter grey. What came was not what I expected:

Lift every voice and sing,
‘Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on ’til victory is won.

Hopefully you know this song by James Weldon Johnson, often referred to as the “Black National Anthem”. That’s not how it was taught to us as kids in the Dade County schools, newly integrated by court order. It was taught to us as something like a promise; we will get through this together, all of us.

Why did this come to me? Possibly because of the next to last line, but more likely because I saw a show on the History Channel where Tom Brokaw ran us through the improbable events of 1968. I was only 3 years old, but I remember bits and pieces of that melee because it foretold the rest of my life. I wound up living in the shadow of that horrible year, and will as long as I breathe.

To me, however, the setup was done just before I was born in 1965. That was the year that the Civil Rights Act was passed, and the USofA was forever divided into people who thought things had gone too far and those who thought that things had not gone far enough. Pat Buchanan, of all people, traces the origin of the “Culture War” to 1968 and the campaign of George Wallace as an independent presidential candidate.

Buchanan also says that the divide can never be healed, a statement that belies the promise made to me as a kid when we all sang together.

I have apparently been thinking about that show and the promises we all made in song ever since I saw it. Like the USofA, race has been always on my mind but suppressed into the recesses where I can refuse to think about it openly. But it is there. I know that.

What unfolded in 1968 was a combination of violent war protests and assassination of those who dared our nation to be better, notably Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. King’s assassination provoked weeks-long riots across the nation, and at some point it seemed to everyone I know who lived through it that everything had fallen apart. It had. It’s been up to all of us to put the pieces back together ever since, and overall we’ve done a horsehit job of it.

That’s not to say that we haven’t made a lot of progress on the racial divide, but there’s only so far we can really go. I mentally added up about a dozen times that I’ve had conversations with people of other races about race in my life, and all of them took place south of the Mason-Dixon line. Up north, people can’t even talk about this for fear of saying something wrong as the dark demons pushed to the back of the mind are allowed forward.

The last time I remember talking with a black man about race was in Savannah Georgia, a wonderful town, and he had to ask me where I was from since I had a northern accent but didn’t talk about things the way a northerner did. I told him I was from Miami, and it all made sense. We were both sons of the New South, a place where we might share a culture even if we didn’t share a race. Perhaps what we shared more than anything was an experience, a time that we did manage to get through.

Race defines nearly everything in the USofA, and our inability to talk about it has confined racial issues to be something that we can never solve. That’s not to say that talk is enough, but it’s the only way to start. I have decided that I have to start using my work to relate some of my experiences as a child of that trying time to other people in hopes that it starts some kind of conversation going. I have to do my part to live up to the promise we sang together.