Michelle Obama! Resplendent!

Monday night Michelle Obama was given a simple task; tell the world how she is just like them. Just like regular Americans. So much has been said about Michelle Obama and very little of it good.

She was stereotyped horribly, called an angry black woman, unpatriotic, militant, a woman who made fun of her husband, someone who did not play well to Middle America. To me Michelle was beautiful. Timidly trying to step into a role so completely improbable that I’m sure she did not even dream of it as young girl; wife of the President of the United States of America. For a black woman the thought of being first-lady, let alone President would not have been an impossible dream, it would not have even been a dream. Young African-American girls do not have such dreams. It is a thoroughly alien proposition that my granddaughter would lay in her bed at night and dream that her African-American husband could be president, or that she could be President. It simply would never happen.

Strike everything I have just said, because Michelle Obama is here! She’s a tickle behind the ear of every pig-tailed black girl in America. I could be president; I could be married to the President. I can dream; and those dreams can actually come true. The most splendid thing about Michelle Obama that has yet to be said is that when her husband, Barack Obama came home one day and said; I want to be President, she didn’t doubt him, she believed! He believed in something impossible; and she believed it right along with him. What’s more she got in to the fight with him. She supported him, got behind him, rolled up her sleeves and worked for him. Monday night at the DNC she delivered America for him.

Who is this woman, this Carthaginian? The world has never seen anything like her. Oprah though beloved by all, is not attempting to attain the highest office in the land. She is alone, an alien in a world that has never seen anything like her. Women who look like her have never been considered beautiful, soft, loyal, hardworking, dedicated, disciplined, nurturing, smart, intelligent, articulate, passionate, or feminine. Because she is all of these things, she certainly can not be “black enough,” to be black. She has entered a world that does not understand her, who is she, and what is she? To them she is a circus freak show. They poke, prod, diagnose and label.

But I know her, I see Michelle Obama in every woman I know, she is my mother, Beatrice Houston, the first African American woman to be trained as an Engineer for GM’s Oldsmobile, in 1966 in Lansing, MI. When my mother arrived at the entrance gate of Oldsmobile, she was told that the "cook's" gate was in the rear. With her head held high, my mother told the guard that she did not come here to cook. She is a friend, Spring Myles, who was a single mother of twins, working full-time during the day as a CPA, and attending law school at night. She reminds me of my sister Joyce, a mother of four, who while pregnant, stood up all day working as a cashier, and still managed to get straight A’s and graduate college with a difficult medical degree, my sister Catherine matriarch of a blended family of five children, who then adopted another child abandoned by her mother. She worked on the factory floor at GM, hefting a 30 pound hammer up to the door of thousands of cars a week for 10 years. Catherine left GM and followed her dream and is now a minister of her own church. As I said before, in my world Michelle Obama is every woman I know. She is just like us. She is an American Woman.

Who goes first: Clinton's supporters clash with Obama has roots in history

Believe it or not, the anger among supporters of Hillary Clinton, who felt their presidential candidate was robbed of her rightful place on the Democratic ticket by the upstart Obama, is a show we've seen before.

It took place long before the days of YouTube and the 24 hour news cycle, long before anyone ever imagined a black man or a white woman would ever be on a presidential ticket of a major American political party.

It was in the days when neither blacks nor women had the right to vote, but had begun the long battle for universal suffrage. Both blacks and women would eventually get there, but not at the same time. And the fight led to a breach between two stalwarts of the 19th century civil rights movement, Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony.

Douglass, anti-slavery abolitionist, was a supporter of women's right to vote, and he attended the famous Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention. The passage of the 14th amendment to the Constitution in 1865 had given blacks their status U.S. citizens, and in combination with the abolition of slavery, they had begun the struggle for the right to vote.

By 1869, the long-time friends in the struggle Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony were on opposite sides of the debate because the 15th Amendment granted suffrage rights to blacks as males. Anthony questioned why women should support this amendment when black men were not continuing to show support for women's voting rights. "When women because they are women are dragged from their homes and hung upon lampposts, .....then they will have the urgency to obtain the ballot," Douglass said. Despite Douglass' obvious logic, that one didn't go over big with Anthony.

In the end, it would not be until the 20th century that either women or African-Americans received full voting rights. Now, in the 21st century, Clinton putting cracks in a "glass ceiling", and with Sen. Barack Obama poised to do what most of us could never have dreamed or imagined, the fight over who should be first is a strange echo of a distant past.