I spent the last day of Barack Obama’s first election campaign in a noisy Santa Monica campaign office, ringing voters in swing states to get out the vote. I was one of thousands of volunteers, and, while waiting for the call sheets for Virginia, I asked the elderly white man opposite if he did this often.
He’d never come before. Why today? I asked. He paused. He’d been at Harvard in the summer of Mississippi Burning in 1964, he said, when civil rights volunteers tried to register the state’s dispossessed blacks to vote. Mississippi whites had reacted with fury and violence.
Volunteer cars containing whites and blacks would be stopped at night on remote roads by menacing Mississippi policemen. I was always expecting to be