Letters

Yes, We Did

Pine Mountain, Calif.

The tears are coming now. Not since the cruel, hopeful spring of 1968, working with Eugene McCarthy to end a different war, have I felt such relief. No one I voted for ever won anything in those days, and no tears came. The tears are coming now. In sheets. Old tears. Buckets of them. They've collected a lifetime. I haven't cried for decades. Now I can't stop. Every time I see Jesse Jackson or John Lewis or Andrew Young or old black ladies hugging and crying outside some Southern clapboard church or a gang of students dancing in some campus quad, I hear the echo of Martin Luther King Jr., and the tears come again. Free at last. An old white man cannot know what black people feel. Their trials can only be imagined. But this one shares their joy. My tears are black.

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