Stu Bykofsky: 'Welcome,' Mom would have said. 'What took you so long?'

TUESDAY WAS a great day for white people, too.

I'm sorry Mom's days ran through the hourglass before Tuesday. She would have wept with joy to see a man of color raise his right hand and become president of the United States.

Truth is, my own eyes got wet while I watched, and it's me that the Bykofsky clan calls "the one with no feelings (except for animals)."

My point is, many, many white - and brown and red and tan - Americans were as moved as black Americans.

Almost.

The way I was raised - and I'm not unique - was to treat other people right, regardless of their skin color, or their religion, or their money, or where their grandparents came from. Maybe most white people felt the same when I was young, but I doubt it.

I'm pretty sure that that way of thinking is the majority now. Maybe a slim majority, but a majority, and growing.

For the past several days, for self-evident reasons, many have been reminiscing about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I've been reminiscing about a Philadelphia with no Liberty Bell and a Chaney who's not a basketball coach.

It was near Philadelphia, Miss., during the Freedom Summer of 1964 that the body of 21-year-old James Chaney, an African-American, was found buried in an earthen dam alongside the bodies of Michael Schwerner, 24, and Andrew Goodman, 20.

The three were civil-rights workers - "outside agitators," many Southerners said - who were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan with the connivance of local cops. In a disgusting chapter of American history, it took decades before anyone was brought to trial.

The murders were a gut punch to righteous America, more so to me because two of them, Schwerner and Goodman, were, like me, New York Jews. I opined a few weeks ago about how Bernie Madoff had shamed fellow Jews. Schwerner and Goodman ennobled them.

I was married with two kids, but the shock of the triple murder propelled me, briefly, into the Freedom Summer. Me and many, many other blacks and whites.

Volunteering for the Deep South required more time than I could get off my job. With my parents' blessing, with some friends, I loaded up my '58 Studebaker and headed for weekends on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, then as segregated and ugly as the Deep South.

That experience is a story for another time.

Many have talked and written about how Dr. King on Tuesday was looking down from heaven. When I look to King's right, I see Chaney and Schwerner and Goodman, and thousands - no, millions - of others, black and white, for whom Tuesday was a day of elation, achievement and satisfaction. Mom is at Dr. King's side, too.
 

Tuesday was a great day for all Americans, of all stripes and colors, and there are more great days to come. President Obama has challenged us to rise to the occasion and the majority - even those who supported John McCain - stand beside our young, biracial, jug-eared, left-handed, slim, smiling president.

I will remember Tuesday as the day - after a very, very long and difficult journey - that African-Americans took their earned seat at the American table.

Mom would have said, "What can I get you to eat?" *

E-mail stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/byko.