"Grateful For Obama, Racial Progress."

Grateful for Obama, racial progress

I am a 71-year-old man who has so much to be thankful for during Thanksgiving 2008. I was blessed with loving parents, brothers, sisters, friends and life's necessities. I grew up in Louisville where my dad, Gordon Craig Whiteley Sr., was a Baptist minister during the 1940s and until he died in 1956. I'm especially thankful for what he taught me, through his words and example, about improving racial relations in a segregated society. He was actively involved in Louisville's ecumenical and interracial activities and sometimes exchanged pulpits and choirs with black pastors and their choirs.

I went all the way through high school and two years of college in all-white schools. It wasn't until I transferred in my junior year to Emporia State, a college in Kansas, that I had the opportunity to go to class with African Americans and work out with them on the cross country and track teams. I am thankful for that experience and will always be thankful for parents who helped shape my positive racial attitudes.

I am most thankful to God this Thanksgiving for allowing me to live long enough to see an African American, Barack Obama, elected as the 44th president of the United States. I believe President-elect Obama is the right person at the right time to lead our nation in the tough times we are currently going through and will continue to face in the future.

PAUL L. WHITELEY, Sr.

Louisville 40207

Editor's comment:

PAUL L. WHITELEY, Sr.:

I am especially grateful this thanksgiving for someone like your parents, who you say "taught me, through his words and example, about improving racial relations in a segregated society", and for you for having learned and practiced what you learned.

Needless to say that I am grateful this thanksgiving, too, for the HOPE that the election of POTUS Barack Obama portends for our country, in the areas of CHANGE, culminating in a new positive direction for racial politics and overall racial attitudes.

The idea is that people who have darker skin, or have names that don't sound European (or viewed as foreign) may no longer be automatically disqualified in voters' minds -- I'm less willing to hold my breath where many Kentuckians are concerned, however, in this regard.