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Subject: DOROTHY GILLIAM=A Generation Knows Where Clinton's Coming From<BY DOROTHY
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 92 08:40:52 EST
Message-ID: <26.1992Nov7.084053@AmeriCast.com>

DOROTHY GILLIAM=A Generation Knows Where Clinton's Coming From<BY
DOROTHY GILLIAM=

Having slipped - gracefully, I hope - past a certain age, I'm
about to find myself, for the first time, with a contemporary as
president of the United States. It's a strange, and not unwel-
come, feeling.

Actually, I'm a little older than the 46-year-old Bill Clinton.
Never mind how much. Besides, age is but one small factor in the
many ways we connect with a national leader. Still, I can relate
to Bill Clinton as with no other U.S.  president.  Despite many
racial, cultural and other differences, we are of the same gen-
eration. We came along at the same time, lived through
corresponding events and were influenced in some ways by the same
people.

We both came of age at a time when the country was in turmoil
over civil rights and Vietnam. When Clinton talks about these
events, I hear him from a deep place of experience.  "In the
1950s, when I was a little boy, I can remember the racial ten-
sions beginning to flare in the open in my state," he said. "I
had the virtue of being raised until I was 4 by a grandfather who
had only a fourth-grade education, but who believed passionately
in the cause of equal rights.

"But I watched my state sundered and torn when the president of
the United States had to call out the National Guard simply to
integrate Little Rock Central High School.

" . . . I watched Martin Luther King shot in Memphis . . . I was
living in Washington when the city erupted in flames. I remember
. . .  sticking a red cross on my car and taking supplies . . .
where people were huddled in the basements of churches, waiting
for food."

We are both southerners (and neither to the manor born) - never
mind that the president-elect had white-skinned privilege and I
battled Jim Crow and Jane Crow. But because of our shared era, if
not quite a shared experience, he is not quite his father's son,
and I'm not quite my mother's daughter.

Coming of age late in the movement to remove the legal vestiges
of segregation, Clinton did not internalize the old racial atti-
tudes in the way that an older generation of WASP southern males
did. Being shaped as a very young adult by the civil rights move-
ment, my generation didn't internalize the messages of powerless-
ness some of our parents did.

Because I'm a few years older than Clinton, I know the African
American women who had to shoulder the burden of livelihood and
dignity in the family during those events, the men and women who
died and bled in the streets for this cause. Yet he was old
enough to make distinctions between whites who threw in their lot
with blacks and the civil rights movement, and those who did not.

From the racial segregation of the 1950s came the civil rights
movement,  which produced more contact between the races by the
1960s. One decade was a natural outgrowth of the other. At the
height of the 1960s movement, pioneering in a journalistic world
where blacks were rare, I understood but didn't quite buy into my
elders' deep shudders of fear at the prospect of Lyndon Baines
Johnson as president simply because he was from the South. (He
went on to be one of the best presidents for civil rights in U.S.
history.)

Bill Clinton and I are products of two different aspects of Amer-
ican culture - lessened segregation and greater cultural integra-
tion. With this blending in the wider country came a blending of
black and white music. In the 1950s, there were no black groups
on the "American Bandstand" I watched on my flickering black-
and-white TV, but that had changed by the 1960s. Out of that
change came Motown, black music that appealed to whites and
blacks. While white groups were influenced by from-the-gut black
music, however, they made it palatable to white audiences by put-
ting it through an antiseptic filter.

Appearing on the Arsenio Hall show, Clinton played "Heartbreak
Hotel" on his saxophone and displayed a feeling of ease with
black-derived popular culture.

While my heroes are Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, Clinton's hero
is Elvis Presley, and he describes his first rock-and-roll ex-
perience as "going nuts over Elvis." Presley was strongly influ-
enced by black music and musicians such as Big Mama Thornton and
Berry; he even occasionally attended a black Baptist church. His
chief contribution was to bring that music to a wider arena so
whites could hear and understand it.

It remains to be seen how much of black culture and how much of
the cataclysmic events and trends of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s
Clinton really absorbed. And those of us in Clinton's generation
will know when he stops being presidential and starts being
"Slick Willie."<02:19 11-07C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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