My thanks to Elana/Leni for sharing that memory with us. It is difficult, but in a good way, to try to make sense of the cultural changes that have brought us from our lives in South Shore to the amazing moment of electing an African-American president--and a South Sider as well. I recently bought the new book about Michelle Obama, which confirms what I earlier had heard--she went to Bryn Mawr for elementary school and lived (and her mother still does) at 74th and Euclid. Amazing.

I'd also like to add a couple of footnotes to Elana's Jesse Owens episode. I don't recall knowing that our principal had so crudely quashed the effort to bring him to school. I do recall being part of the National Conference of Christians and Jews annual "Brotherhood Conference." A number of us attended it, at DuSable High School I believe, in the fall of our junior year (1957!!), and Jesse Owens was the speaker then. He was inspiring and gracious, and perhaps that whetted the appetite of Leni and others to see if we could bring him to SSHS. Amazingly, the DuSable student who chaired the event that year was Bernard Shaw, who later became the CNN anchor. (In the Fall of '59, on my airplane trip to Boston to start college, Jesse Owens happened also to be a passenger. We talked for a few minutes, and he was kind enough to even let me believe that he remembered me from the NCCJ event.)

The following year, some of us were more actively involved in the planning of that NCCJ conference. For me, it included travelling across the city to Wells High School for planning meetings; all of the students there were African-American, and the planning committee brought together white, Asian, and black students. A very unusual experience for me in that era. That involvement also led to Norm Leaf and me driving out to a high school on the far South Side--probably in Altgeld Gardens where I think Barack Obama later did much of his first community work--to give a Thanksgiving speech to an all African-American student body. I recall feeling awkward and presumptuous to think that I might have anything worthwhile to say to these students about what they should be thankful for.

In retrospect, these were good things to do, but they did very little to bridge the gulf between our insulated, de facto segregated life in South Shore and the lives of the diverse, disadvantaged communities around us. As Norm recently mentioned to me, we white kids could be invited to speak at an all-black high school, but Leni's story reminds us that the reverse would not have been allowed. In short, we were shielded in the 1950s from so much of what was developing around us and later exploded in Chicago and elsewhere in the civil rights movement of the '60s. I share Elana's gratitude for the changes that we are living through now, and there's so much farther to go.

I also can't resist expressing the thought that it's too bad Michelle Obama didn't go to SSHS, but instead went to a newer, magnet high school. Just think what a successful career she could have had as a South Shore High graduate! . . . Oh wait, I guess she did okay nonetheless.

I look forward to seeing you all at the Reunion in August.

With fond memories,

Ken Manaster