He's 71 now and his legs can't carry him anywhere near the long distances he regularly marched for civil rights in his younger days.
For this presidential inauguration, Rance O'Quinn sat down and watched on television the embodiment of one of the civil rights movement's highest goals take the oath of office.
It's been a long walk to Jan. 20, 2009 for the man born and raised in Centreville, Miss., a small town of mostly sharecroppers near the Louisiana border. His father was shot in the back of the head on Aug. 14, 1959 for educating other black Americans about their rights.
O'Quinn became president of the Springfield branch of the NAACP; a director of investigations for the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination; a staff member at the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights; a supervisor of investigations and acting area office director for the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission in Boston.
There are names and dates, births, deaths and killings, the blessings of his family, what he lost along the way and now, Barack Obama.
He has simple advice for the new president: "Steady as you go."
The footprints leading to the beginnings of the civil rights movement are many and O'Quinn's are there, steady as he went.
There was the quiet courage of Rosa Parks, who refused to sit at the back of the bus in Montgomery, Ala. on Dec. 1, 1955. There were the heinous crimes committed by two white men against 15-year-old Emmett Till just a few months earlier, on Aug. 28, 1955, in Money, Miss., for whistling at a white girl. O'Quinn was in high school when he heard of Till's torture and beating death, and saw there was a long road ahead.
In an interview at his Springfield home, where two infant granddaughters vied for his constant and gentle attention, he recalled how hopeful he was when, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education that schools could not be divided by color. He thought that change was coming for sure, and that it would be fast. But as he learned painfully over the years, and acutely when his own father, Samuel O'Quinn, was gunned down at his doorstep, change is the result of many steps, many votes, many years.
Last year, then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Emmett Till Unresolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which reopened the investigations of civil rights murders in Mississippi. Samuel O'Quinn's killing is among those that are under consideration for review.
Since his youth, Rance O'Quinn has worked to eradicate institutional racism. While Obama's election is a sign of progress, the march hasn't yet ended with human rights for all, he said.
"Everything has changed," he points out, "but everything has stayed the same."
Still, when he and his wife Shirley went to vote the morning of Nov. 4, he felt history as the pulse in his fingertips, the pounding of his heart, a soft tap on his shoulder. As he stood in the voting booth and connected the broken arrow to Obama's name, he had a quiet moment as he remembered his father.
"This is something my father had always wanted to do: to vote," he said. "Even though I was the only one voting, it was something my father was doing as well."
By day's end, Obama pulled a 10-million popular vote advantage over McCain, 70 million to 60 million, and 365 electoral votes—more than the 270 needed to win the presidency. "It was a crying moment," O'Quinn said.
In a first-person story published in 2004 in the Springfield Republican, O'Quinn's daughter, columnist Bea O'Quinn Dewberry, wrote about the family's summer trips from Massachusetts to Mississippi to visit her grandmother Ida. "I thought sleeping and eating in the car was just part of the fun—sort of a camping trip on the road," she wrote. "I learned later in life avoiding stops on the road was intentional."
O'Quinn and those who walked with him carried this country to this historic moment. By rights, they all should have had front-row seats at Obama's inauguration.
But it was one trip too far. So as I stood at the inauguration, I kept thinking: Mr. O'Quinn, yes, please sit down, rest your aching feet. Millions of others are walking now."
Natalia Munoz is editor of La Prensa of Western Mass. (www.LaPrensa.Ma.com).
