Obama's Tucson Speech, and Memories of a Revival Tent Part 1

Late on a hot summer afternoon in 1962, in northwestern Louisiana,  not long after I'd turned 13, I discovered the great curiosity that was the Southern revival tent. The impact of that discovery, though somewhat faded today on the almost-62-year-old surface of my life, is capable of letting itself be known, given the right call. And such a call it heard when President Obama spoke in Tucson in the wake of the shooting that took the lives of six, and changed the lives of millions.


I was living on an Air Force base outside Shreveport, Louisiana. It was my first encounter with the South.  Although my father's line is founded in strong and deep Southern roots nurtured by six-generations of Tennessee-raised Moores, his father, also  military, had raised my father in the Philippines, half-a-world away from his birthplace near Montgomery, Alabama.  On  my mother's side, the blood is as New England blue as it can get--traced to the decks of the Mayflower, and well-beyond--far back to England's shores and on up through Scotland to the Firth of Forth. Her life, begun in Albany, teethed on Providence, and influenced by her teen years in Hollywood as the daughter of a movie producer, was cradled in the care of white servants, cooks, gardeners, and nannies.

As a peripatetic military brat--the son of a cavalry officer--my dad experienced little of the traditional Southern growing up that might have bent his thoughts toward racism or bigotry.  When it was his turn to travel the world with his small family of four, he took us to his duty stations in Germany a decade after WW II, and then back to the U.S., at the height of the Cold War, where we lived in modest little towns, mostly in the Midwest--Ohio and Nebraska.  For me, Negroes, or "the colored," or just black people, were invisible--not because I chose not to see them, but because the eddies of life had not cast me into that stream of multi-racial encounters.  This is all to say that nothing in my first twelve years prepared me for the jolt--the palpable electric shock--of reality that followed my father's transfer to Barksdale Air Force Base in 1962.