Racial Equality

He's the guy -- one of them, anyway -- Bill Clinton and George Bush will fight over.He's a white male, about 50 years old, married and the father of a teen-ager. He lives in a middle-class-to-affluent suburb of Baltimore. He is colleged-educated, a partner in a highly successful business.He liked John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. As a college student in Maryland, he was a CORE volunteer -- to those who have forgotten, that stands for Congress Of Racial Equality -- and took part in sit-ins at a segregated Prince George's County restaurant in the early 1960s.

THE IRONY of celebrating the just-concluded Black History Month is that history for blacks is still happening; their history is their present, and their future their past. All the degradation, intolerance, enmity and inequality still exists. Life for them has never has been nor ever will be the "crystal stair" poet Langston Hughes spoke of.The distance this country still must traverse to achieve racial equality is most apparent outside the big cities. The city has a way of covering over its inequities.