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excelled in corporations is not a testament to our country's greatness but to their own individual resiliency and perseverance.

And more recently, entire black families were being purposefully denied treatment and left to die from syphilis in some Nazi-like medical experiment that lasted until 1972? No, not in 1972 could this have been done to black people in this great country. To our shame, it was only stopped then after the press reported it. Should President Clinton's apology for the country to the men involved some 25 years later be enough to reassure black people that we care what happens to them now? And as late as the 1990's it can't be denied that our government was slow to act on the HIV/AIDS epidemic and didn't really get serious about fighting the problem until it got into our blood supply and became our problem and not just a gay or black problem. Even if black people today trust the medical community enough to go to the doctor, should they be expected to believe they would get the same aggressive care as a white person?

When the average white person talks about these things today, it's with an air of denial like someone else was responsible or they offer the excuse that the times were different back then. No, we did it, as white people, as white communities and on a local government level headed by whites. Some of us fought the rights of black people to be free in society every step of the way all the way to the Supreme Court and Congress. Changes have been made but only when black people fought for those changes.

Yes, white people fought a war to end slavery but then spent the next hundred years standing in the way of the exercise of their full freedoms. And some white people joined the civil rights movement and a mostly white government did recognize the wrong that was being done but only after having to be confronted with it. Even then we rested on our laws and didn't do enough to ensure that blacks had representatives at all levels of government and a voice in making future laws and policies that would address their concerns. It is to our national shame as citizens and especially to the two political parties that there have only been 2 black senators in the US Senate since 1967 and not both at the same time. This too will change but not because those within the government or the parties decide to give up their positions to black candidates. It will happen when we all realize that a 1% minority in the Senate cannot adequately understand the issues and properly govern our nation of a 15% black population.

Please take notice of who's saying it the next time you hear someone say that black people or any minority should be grateful to live in a country where all people are free to become anything they want to become and for all the opportunities America gives them. What we really should say to them is, you are Americans as much as any of us are Americans and any pride or gratitude that is due goes also to you. We are grateful to you, our black citizens, for the progress you've made for all of us in a nation that resisted that progress. Because of your struggle to be truly free and by confronting us with our own hypocrisy, you are making us into that country we said we were where all people are free.

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