(HOST) Commentator Robert Hager is a native Vermonter who went off to work for NBC news in the U.S. and abroad for many years. Now, he finds himself reacting emotionally to the outcome of the presidential election.
(HAGER) Having spent my life as a reporter of straight news, I’m used to keeping my personal opinions under wraps: especially politics. In public, I try hard to stay neutral. But after this election, I can’t help admitting… I’m moved.
My wife and I grew up in Vermont – I in Woodstock, my wife in Rutland – where in those days of the 1950s there were no problems here between whites and blacks. In fact, there were no blacks. Well, not many. In Woodstock, there was only Tommy Hazzard, our local Boy Scout master – and loved by the entire community. But we soon discovered it wasn’t the same over much of the country.
When, after college, I took my first job – broadcasting minor league baseball in North Carolina – my wife and I were suddenly in the thick of it: segregated schools, separate drinking fountains, separate worlds.
When our ball team was on the road, the black players were refused service at restaurants. The whites had to bring them take-out food.
By the time I switched to reporting news and moved to the state’s capitol, Raleigh, the civil rights movement was underway. Black students marched, singing freedom songs. There were sit-ins and arrests until the courts intervened. And one by one, businesses were integrated. My radio station let me put it all on the air. But incredibly, the two television stations in Raleigh would not cover a moment of it. Their owners called it "trouble, stirred by outside agitators."
Later, working for tv in Washington, DC, I watched it turn ugly. Still, today, I’m haunted by images of the rioting that left the entire city under a thick layer of smoke, tinted red by fires in the streets. In the thick of it I was pulled from my car by an angry mob – just because I was white – only to be saved by a black civil rights leader who knew me and shouted "No, no, let him go: he’s all right!"
As NBC’s correspondent on Boston bussing, I saw white crowds outside the high school in Southy spit at police.. and I can never forget watching in horror as whites surrounded and stoned a bus filled with terrified young black students – first and second graders.
Flash forward three decades and so much has changed. New generations have come of age. There are new laws and new attitudes..
..culminating in the election of Barack Obama.
Today I want to shout "How about that?" to the restaurants that wouldn’t serve the black ballplayers.. and to the tv-bosses who wouldn’t cover the sit-ins! "How about that?" to the crowds that spit and threw stones in Boston!
Nearly fifty years after my wife and I left the relative tranquility of Vermont to be immersed in a world of racial-problems, now we’re back here and retired. So permit me to say that, after all I saw and covered, I find the outcome of this election… emotionally overwhelming.