Sonny's Corner

"Sonny's Corner" is a regular column in Prairie Fire, featuring commentary on civil rights and justice issues. Our friend and Omaha colleague, Joseph P. "Sonny" Foster, died suddenly at age 54 in August 2005. He left an uncompleted agenda, as did many of our civil rights and justice mentors and heroes. We shall attempt to move forward on that unfinished agenda through this column.

By Dick Fellman

I miss Sonny.

We were friends for 35 years or more, we had lunch or dinner together from time to time,; we went to Nebraska football games together and spent the day; but most of all, we talked; and the best of our conversations were not about football.

We talked politics.

I have known no one who knew more or thought more clearly about anything political than Sonny Foster. He had an uncanny ability to know political boundaries, left and right, but most of all, he could determine exactly where the center was in any situation. That has never been an easy task.

I’ve wondered what Sonny would be thinking these days, especially about Sen. Barack Obama and Reverend Jeremiah Wright, for Sonny listened to the same preachers and felt the same pressures which Wright articulated and Obama ingested those 20 years he sat in the pews of Wright’s church.

Sonny would never, I am certain, entertain or give a bit of credence to the extreme statements of Wright, those about AIDS, or Sept. 11, or Louis Farrakhan, but he would have applauded the works of Wright’s church with the needy, the hungry, the jobless and all those of color who still feel the pain of the unimaginable agreement between South and North which our Founding Fathers made with the “three-fifths compromise” and the 20 years of legal slave trade, not to mention the Missouri Compromise and Jim Crow and Plessey v. Ferguson.

Why, I’ve often wondered, wasn’t another clause added to the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights simply stating that “all human servitude, except as punishment for a crime duly determined by a court of law, is hereby abolished.”

Sonny full well knew and understood the historical reasons for all those obscenities. While he practiced politics with no semblance of anger, I think he would have applauded Sen. Obama’s Philadelphia speech, with its echo of the address Sen. John F. Kennedy gave in the fall of 1960 to the white Protestant ministers gathered in conference in Houston, Texas.

Kennedy methodically outlined his own background. He explained how nobody asked him when he was in combat in the South Pacific during World War II whether the fact that he was a Catholic in any way caused him to be disloyal to the United States. Nor did they ask, Kennedy explained, anything of the sort of his older brother, who was shot down and killed somewhere in Europe when he voluntarily undertook a secret and dangerous aerial mission.

There was absolutely no applause during Kennedy’s Houston speech, but when he was asked if he would contact Cardinal Cushing in Boston and ask the prelate to obtain a letter from the Pope absolving Kennedy from “taking orders from Rome,” Kennedy offered a quick, spontaneous reply.

Kennedy explained his belief in the separation of church and state once again in the simplest of terms; and with that the ministers for the first time broke into applause. One minister rose and addressed Kennedy: “Senator, you have the respect of everyone in this room.”

I think Barack Obama has that same respect, and he has done much the same as when he first explained why he stood by Reverend Wright and again as he separated himself from Reverend Wright.

But I wonder if today we as a nation have yet overcome the ugliness of discrimination that has dogged us from our nation’s first days. As this is written, Obama is on the cusp of the Democratic presidential nomination, but the results of the overwhelming vote against him in both Kentucky and West Virginia clearly raise the question of whether or not there is an underlying issue of race in the hearts of many voters.

It caused me pain to hear Sen. Hilary Clinton’s campaign “play the race card” as it did, though she has since ceased any semblance of those slanderous actions. For today, whether one agrees with Obama or not, no one can do anything but applaud a nation that seems to have finally moved beyond the days of separateness in our politics into an era of acceptance, an age where, as Reverend King said, “no one shall be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

If Sonny Foster were alive today, I am certain you would find him in the forefront of those leading the way to that mountaintop of Reverend King’s. Sonny would tally the votes and understand the significance of every twist and turn in the nomination process, almost as quickly as those wonderful electronic charts on CNN; and if Sonny were to be asked what one should do, Sonny’s answer would be quite simple.

“Do what is right.” That’s all Sonny would say.

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