Bob Ray Sanders Takes Me Back to Camelot

Bob Ray Sanders took me back to the nostalgic days of Camelot, when there was a twinkle in the eye of black kids like us who were inspired to hope in the future of America. We each recall when President John F. Kennedy came to Fort Worth on that November night. Downtown was dressed up in yellow lights, like the Yellow Rose of Texas, so the President could see this "Queen of the Prairie" from his Air Force One. We were a small, but proud city.

We remember seeing JFK emerge from his black limousine in front of the Texas Hotel. Mr. Kennedy sent the Secret Service scrabbling when he stepped out on the passenger side, in order to touch the crowd. We were little colored boys squeezed in the crowd, with the audacity to hope.

During the lunch hour the next day, November 22, 1963, while listening to one of those new modern transistor radios, we got the news that Kennedy had left Fort Worth and had been shot in Dallas. Bob Ray Sanders, and the rest of us young teens at I.M. Terrell High School, shed our tears in the dust of a segregated school. But we woke up the next day as the children of destiny- the students that propelled the Civil Rights Movement.

This morning, associate editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Bob Ray Sanders, my fellow schoolmate, added his voice of endorsement to Barack Obama. (See “Keeping that hope alive”). We are aged old black men, with that same magic sparkle of exuberance and hope.