August 2012

At 9:00 on the morning of Tuesday March 20, 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton stepped to a
 podium in the State Department’s Benjamin Franklin Dining Room and addressed a roomful of reporters, federal officials, and a sprinkling of female military aviators. Behind her sat the Secretary of Transportation, the foreign minister of the nation of Kiribati, the CEO of Lockheed Martin, underwater explorer Robert Ballard, and Richard Gillespie, executive director of The Investigative Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). Secretary Clinton began by describing her youthful admiration for Amelia Earhart, “a woman who, when it was really hard, decided she was going to break all kinds of limits—social limits, gravity limits, distance limits. Nobody,” the secretary explained, “was there to tell Amelia Earhart she couldn’t do whatever she wanted.”

You wouldn’t know Piedmont anymore—my Piedmont, I mean—the town in West Virginia where I learned to be a colored boy. The 1950s in Piedmont was a sepia time, or at least that’s the color my memory has given it. People were always proud to be from Piedmont—nestled against a wall of mountains, smack-dab on the banks of the mighty Potomac. We knew God gave America no more beautiful location. I never knew colored people anywhere who were crazier about mountains and water, flowers and trees, fishing and hunting. For as long as anyone could remember, 
we could outhunt, outshoot, and outswim the white boys in the valley. We didn’t flaunt our rifles and shotguns, though, because that might make the white people too nervous.