It is a measure of America's racial agony that when a black man became mayor of Newark last week, his ascent to political power seemed to many a threat to the system rather than a confirmation of it.
Nothing, really, had changed. A boy born in poverty to hard-working parents had pushed himself through twelve long years of night school to earn a college degree. The long suppressed ethnic group to which he belonged grew in number and in influence. He saw the political process as the correct, the constructive avenue for expressing his people's hopes and dissipating their fears.
If...