Inaugurating the future: L. Douglas Wilder is sworn in as first U.S. Black elected governor - Virginia

Ebony, April, 1990 by Lerone Bennett, Jr.

Inaugurating The Future

WHEN, a hundred years from today, historians set down the true history of our times, they will probably say that the Civil War ended not in April 1865 but in January 1990 when Lawrence Douglas Wilder, the grandson of slaves, stood on a platform in front of a Thomas Jefferson-designed Capitol, the former seat of the Confederacy, and was sworn in as the first Black governor of Virginia and the first Black elected governor in U.S. history.

There was history--and poetry--in the event and the hour and the place. For this was more than the inauguration of a man--it was the inauguration of a new and different future. And it brought together descendants of slaves and descendants of slaveowners in an unforgettable moment of memory and transcendence.

No one understood this better than the thousands who stood for hours in the bone-chilling cold to see history in the making. Some in the predominantly Black crowd said irreverently that various Confederate heroes and certain White founding fathers were pirouetting in their graves, but the same people said Blacks and Whites must make a special effort to confront and transcend the past in the making of the "New Mainstream" that Gov. Wilder called for.

The event began appropriately enough with an invocation by a Black Baptist minister, the Rev. Joe B. Fleming, who quoted--what else?--"Lift Every Voice and Sing:"

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who has brought us thus far along the way. . . . "Thank you! The old order changeth, giving place to the new."

The changing of the orders was on the mind of the new governor who pledged himself to expand for others the rights denied his forebears, both slave and "free".

"And let us likewise be thankful," he said, "that--while our country gave birth to a freedom long denied and delayed for all who loved freedom--the belief in these dreams held by those forebears was passed from generation to generation, and spawned the seeds that propagated the will and the desire to achieve."

Quoting Cicero and Langston Hughes ("Freedom . . . is a dream deferred when it dries up like a raisin in the sun. . . ."), he corrected the Declaration of Independence, saying:

"We mark today not a victory of party or the accomplishments of an individual but the triumph of an idea. . . . the idea . . . that all men and women are created equal," adding:

"If these words about freedom are to be heard at all today, I hope they will be heard by the young people of this commonwealth. I want them to know:

* That oppression can be lifted;

* That discrimination can be eliminated;

* That poverty need not be binding;

* That disability can be overcome."

Lawrence Douglas Wilder, the brilliant lawyer who rose from grinding poverty in Richmond's Church Hill neighborhood and succeeded a long line of slaveowners and segregationists and revolutionaries, including former governors Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, is his own best example.