Spring Break
MLK Day ushers in Obama for young and old alike
Aaron Hedge
Issue date: 1/20/09 Section: News
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The Lesher Junior High School student told a crowd of about 40 people in the CSU Library on Monday -- the 23rd anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the day before the first black president of the U.S. will be sworn in -- that his experience of American culture since he moved from South Korea with his parents hasn't been an easy one.
His parents moved from city to city across the U.S. years before they came to Fort Collins, and Jaeheon experienced racism in each of them.
In Florida in third grade, classmates made fun of him for being Chinese, although he is Korean.
"Then I was called Chinese," Jaeheon said. "Imitations of made-up Chinese words were slung at me. They didn't even know where South Korea was. I was wounded. Nothing had changed."
And it happened over and over, until Election Day last year when Americans overcame a 219-year-old racial barrier that has excluded ethnic minorities from the Oval Office since America was founded.
"Then Barack Obama became president of the United States," Jaeheon said. "The dream had finally come true. The hope from Pandora's Box escaped. America had changed."
He was one of 12 Poudre Valley School District students who read essays about the holiday to the students and community members who gathered in the library before the annual MLK Day parade that snaked through Fort Collins Monday afternoon from Old Town Square to the Lory Student Center Ballroom.
This year's holiday marked an historic benchmark in racial quality for the U.S., as it comes one day before Obama makes his inauguration speech.
Abigail McCeney, one of Jaeheon's fellow classmates, read to the audience about her grandfather's role in a 1960s federal investigation into voter registration practices in Alabama that uncovered voter registration officials quietly segregating services for white and black voters.
"In Alabama, the voting officials made long and difficult registration application forms that made it complicated for African Americans to register," she said. "The voting officials would help fill in forms for white registrant who were illiterate, although they would not do this for African Americans in the same situation."
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