Walk down 18th and Vine in Kansas City on a typical 
weekday afternoon and you'll have a hard time
bumping into another person, even if you try.

Today, thousands gathered in the space between
the Gem Theatre and the Jazz and Negro Baseball
Museums, and there were so many people crammed
into the space that it was a sea of faces for
three blocks. 

As the crowd waited on a beautiful
fall day for Michelle Obama to take the stage
beneath the largest American flag I've ever
seen, I listened to the mothers who had brought
their children, the young people taking photos,
and the community organizers who held clipboards
with Voter Registration forms. 

The excitement in their voices was somewhat muted, until Michelle stepped on stage in a
red dress (my, Buck O'Neill is smiling in heaven at this sight!). 

Now it was urgent that people find a spot to see her in the flesh.
The television cameras and press stage were directly ahead of us, and unless a
cameraman straddled his tripod, we couldn't see Michelle a half a block away. 

Two elderly ladies in their suits were desperate to catch a glimpse.
Several of us moved aside and helped point the way through the legs and signs
and other obstacles. "There. There she is!"

The smiles of deep contentment on these sixty year old faces would have lit up a stadium.
Then it hit me. For them, the generation that came before us and survived the blatant
racism that counted their lives as less than mine, this is nothing short of a miracle.
To think they lived to see the day that a young African American woman would stand up
on a stage and ask them to vote for her husband for President of the United States
was a day they thought was in the distant future. 

As Barack Obama said in a speech I witnessed earlier this week in Washington, D.C.,
this is the moment when children stand on the shoulders of those who came before.

In this crowd in Kansas City, on this day, children were literally standing on the
shoulders of their parents to catch a glimpse of Michelle Obama. Unforgettable.

Lynn Hinkle