According to the census of 1860, nearly a third of all Virginia residents were slaves. Richmond, the state's capital, would become capital of the Confederacy, and the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee would become the rebellion's military bulwark. Tuesday, northern Virginia swung the state to Obama.
America's tormented history of race relations began in Virginia in 1610, when a Dutch privateer in need of refitting bartered 20 African slaves captured from a Spanish ship for food and rigging. Virginia was the first colony to formally enact laws consigning indentured blacks to lifelong slavery based on race.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday, November 07, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 29 Editorial pages Desk 1 inches; 23 words Type of Material: Correction
Candidate: In Tim Rutten's column Wednesday, the name of the 1908 Democratic presidential candidate was misspelled. He was William Jennings Bryan, not Bryant.
Tuesday, a coalition of those slaves' descendants, young people of all races, Latinos and educated white voters swept all that stems from that tragic history into the realm of painful memory, when they carried Virginia into Obama's column.
If this election had a decisive turning point, it wasn't the Wall Street meltdown but Obama's response to the controversy that arose over the racially inflammatory and divisive sermons of his then-pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. One hundred and fifty years after another Illinois lawyer turned presidential candidate, Lincoln, changed the way Americans thought about race with his famous "House Divided" speech, Obama delivered his "More Perfect Union" address in Philadelphia, across the street from Constitutional Hall.
Obama wrote the speech himself, and, at the time, analysts recognized it as the most sophisticated and far-seeing address on race ever delivered by a candidate for national office in our lifetime. It changed the tone of the contest and elevated his campaign to something that was more than the sum of his ethnic heritage.
As he said that day, in the same city where the framers failed to resolve the contradiction between their ideals and their economic interests, "The profound mistake of Rev. Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country ... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past."
The voters who gave Barack Obama more than 300 electoral votes Tuesday may not have forgotten that tragic past, but -- attentive at last to the better angels of our nature -- they no longer are content to let memory be our destiny.
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timothy.rutten@latimes.com
