Dawn of the Unthinkable by James Concannon Page B

enough
ambition anymore. In his mid-thirties, he was now settled into the
academic life, which was awfully hard to leave. The respect he
received from his community was very gratifying because they
realized while anyone could be a politician, very few black men
became professors. Hell, it was amazing enough when one made it to
adulthood without being arrested as Cunningham had. Oh, he had come
close on several occasions, mouthing off to cops or being on the
fringe of a protest where a couple of dozen people were locked up,
but he had never gotten snagged himself. He had made a vow with
himself early on that he wouldn’t become part of the depressing
statistics for his race, which showed that high percentages of the
males were under supervision by the criminal justice system. He had
stuck to his books and now was a member of academia. While he was
satisfied with that, he was starting to feel the rumblings of
discontent that arise when one isn’t challenged enough.
    He felt that he had the makings of a fine
leader. Although academic life rarely called for soaring rhetoric,
he felt he had studied enough real leaders to imitate their means
and methods if the situation called for it. He knew it was a long
way from actually doing something to having read about it, but he
knew he had it in him. He had been in the service as an ROTC
Lieutenant and had been honorably discharged after serving his
hitch. He had been on the school board also, but that did not lead
to the type of major overhauls that he wanted to be a part of. He
felt that he had analyzed enough history to know what not to
do, and half the time, that is what good leaders knew best. But if
he wasn’t willing to play the political game, he had no future, as
people didn’t just march up to your door and draft you. So here he
sat in the ivory tower, knowing what he would try if he could but
was apparently never going to get the chance.
    Of course, the matter of race still stood in
the way. Very few black men had made it to the top, and the ones
who did, like Colin Powell—who apparently was much like him and
didn’t want to sell his soul to the moneychangers—were few and far
between. He still wished Powell would go for the Presidency just to
make it easier for the next blacks to run. He had been in the
unique position to run a “successful” war, which didn’t come around
too often. History often showed that the leaders of a successful
war were often handed civilian leadership positions (Eisenhower,
Grant, Washington) when they retired, so Powell might have been a
shoo-in if he chose to run. But as he himself had made almost an
identical decision, he couldn’t fault Powell.
    His students did appreciate his insight into
how the common people were affected by the decisions from on high.
He had done much of his research on how people down below had lived
and often died as a result of the political upheaval generated by
just a few people. While it was often hard to get interested in
treaties, agreements, and other long-winded documents, when he
explained how craftsmen ended up making showerheads to pipe gas
into German extermination chambers, the students paid attention.
Unfortunately, after he told them a story that grabbed them, he
still had to get back to the meat and potatoes, and the lights
would go back out in their eyes. He knew that the students he
taught usually wouldn’t go on to be poli-sci majors, but he also
knew that if they only paid attention, they might be able to avoid
many mistakes in their lives that had already been made by someone
else. Oh well, you could only lead a horse to water , he
thought.
    He had recently become interested in an
obscure line of politics called utopian socialism. Sir Thomas More
had written a story in the 1500s about an island where the people
had developed an enviable lifestyle based on mutual cooperation
rather than capitalism. The word “utopia” had entered the language
to describe an extremely desirable state of