To me, the Karen Bleier of Getty Images photograph was as beautiful as any picture that Norman Rockwell ever painted.
Seven-year old Sasha Obama had her nose pressed against the bullet-proof window as her bright, brown eyes peered at the paparazzi that had gathered around the blue Secret Service SUV that would take her to the exclusive Sidwell Friends School that Washington, D.C. morning. Her little brown face had the same look of concern that any child in any new city would have going to any new school. It was so similar to an image that I had seen before that it actually made me tremble.
That other image, taken in 1957, lacked only the detail colors of modern photography; and while little Sasha was obviously in the moment, it was in that moment when I saw the picture, both Sasha and I were actually in two separate but similar moments together. While for Sasha, Sidwell was a matter of mere minutes away. But, for me, and likely for many other progressive Americans, that moment was the condensation of what seemingly was a fleeting 52 years.
Upon arriving at the school, along with a Secret Service agent, Michelle Obama escorted the little angel into her classroom.
To some Americans, such a photograph breeds animosity. To others, it means nothing more than that the daughter of a president was going to school. After all, we have seen such scenes in the past with Amy Carter and others. To millions of other Americans, it means that we all are one step closer to that day when our Constitution will mean the same things to all of us.
It is likely that others like me found our selves a bit overcome by the simple picture of a child looking out of the window of a vehicle; and I did dab the corners of my eye with a facial tissue that had somehow found its way to my desk. For you see, I saw more than just one little girl in an SUV on her way to school traveling through just one moment in time.
Though my vision was blurred by a tear or two, when I saw Bleier’s color photograph, my mind’s eye flashed back to the murky black and white images that had one day poured out of the television set that was in the living room of that old house where we once lived. It was between the hard red bricks of Hyde Park Boulevard and the modest, gray cinder block apartments of the nearly segregated Hyde Park Village. Though now reinforced by the hundreds of pictures that have appeared in magazines and PBS specials, I recalled the newsreels of that day at Central High School in Little Rock and agents escorting nine young black students, not too unlike little Sasha, past a rabid mob of anachronistic thinkers who were hell-bent on keeping the world segregated. Except for their race, those officers and troops that did the escorting then were not too unlike the Secret Service agent that was now escorting young Sasha into Sidwell.
There is likely no way now that the bright eyed child that peered through the window of that SUV can understand that in one of her tiny hands she held tightly onto the future. In the other hand, Sasha had reached far back into the past and had gripped the hopes and the pains of some seven generations of parents who were not only the sons and daughters of Africa, but the descendants of all of the people of this great world. Along with the aspirations of their children, she took them all to more than Sidwell with her that day. While it seemed that she rode inside the SUV, Sasha was actually traveling upon the dreams of all of those who had gone before her in time, but they had not yet made it.
They made it that day. For in that moment, little Sasha symbolically stood on the peak of that great mountain that separates what was from what now is. She had been led and pushed there by Americans of every stripe and of every star. And with the same expression that she had when she looked through that bullet-proof window that day, she also looked at the dark, sun-crested silhouetted figure by whose side she figuratively stood. Then, as if on cue, releasing the shadowy hand of Dr. Martin Luther King, Sasha’s heart shattered the glass barricade that would allow millions of the aforementioned children to flood down the rocky path and into the land of which King once spoke.
I thank Bleier for her photo of this and may God keep and lead little Sasha, as He blesses this great country of ours.
Ken Hamilton is a Niagara Falls resident. He can be contacted at Kenhamilton930@aol.com.
