As America prepares to inaugurate its first black president next week, it's worth remembering the sacrifices that have been made along the way.
Many people and places have been part of the story — Martin Luther King Jr., of course, whose birthday the nation will pause to remember the day before Barack Obama takes the oath of office, is probably the most prominent name on the list, and many cities and towns have served as the backdrop in the effort to live up to the high ideals the founding fathers established.
The "Little Rock Nine," as the nine black high school students who earned a mention in the history books as the ones who brought integration to the public schools in Little Rock, Ark., are known, certainly did their part — even if most people today don't know their names.
But one of the nine, Carlotta Walls LaNier, tells CNN that she and the other black students in Little Rock played a pivotal role in laying the foundation for Obama's election.
No doubt she is right about that — but their contribution to Obama's victory is no greater than Rosa Parks' or Fannie Lou Hamer's or James Meredith's or the three civil rights workers who were murdered in the Freedom Summer of 1964.
Or the countless, nameless, faceless white Americans who participated in the effort to bring equality to America.
One of my favorite movies from the 1980s, "Mississippi Burning," presented a fictionalized account of that Freedom Summer. Early in the film, Gene Hackman, who plays an older FBI agent, chides Willem Dafoe, his younger, idealistic companion, for his youth and inexperience.
Dafoe tells Hackman that he's been through this kind of thing before, that he was with Meredith at Ole Miss and suffered a gunshot wound.
Hackman says, "Well, at least you lived. That's important."
"No, Meredith lived," Dafoe replies. "That's what's important."
Together, they wrote their chapters in the history of the struggle for equal rights in this country, a struggle that continues in the form of the efforts for equal rights for women, the handicapped and gays. Great strides have been made, but, in the years to come, other groups — religious groups, ethnic groups, and other minorities — may also emerge as groups that have been denied their rights in one way or another but have gone unnoticed by the majority of their fellow Americans.
To be sure, there is much on Obama's plate as he prepares to take office. There are great issues that affect all Americans. But perhaps, as a beneficiary of the black struggle in America, he will be more than a symbol to the downtrodden and will "give something back" to those who still yearn for their civil rights.
