Primary day in Rhode Island. Southern air has drifted in. The thermometer reads mid-fifties, and it feels warmer. Filtered through humid air, the sun gives us sparkly off-the-bay light. Altogether, the morning’s an advertisement for New England.

There’s been good energy up here. At home, I’ve been canvassed four times for Obama. The latest visitor was a chirpy New Hampshirite. I asked why her neighbors hadn’t finished the contest up there. She said it was good the campaign had continued. We agreed that both candidates had matured and then worried over the downside, the need to stake out Ohio-friendly positions on NAFTA. The pollwatchers were equally voluble. The Obama team was dominated by black women in tweed hats. Wonderful day, they urged me, and I said, yes, wonderful day, which they took, correctly, as acknowledgment that we were on the same side.

I always love voting; I’m a sap for democracy. But there’s something especially invigorating about going out to pull the lever (actually, to draw a black pen-stroke for an optical scanner) for Obama. I know, the choice should be about issues, character, and electability. But let’s be frank. It’s exciting to think of a black man in the White House.

The New York Times ran an op-ed a few days back favoring that word choice: black, over African American. It’s none of my business. Let the people most affected choose for themselves. Still, I find myself in agreement.

African-American leads to all kinds of trouble. I remember a broadcaster referring to Nelson Mandela as a great African-American leader. The journalist meant black and would have spared himself embarrassment if he’d said what he meant.

I was there when Negro turned to black. As an undergraduate, I wrote for the Harvard Crimson. Out ahead of the national media, we made an editorial decision to change both the noun and the adjective. Black was black power, black and proud—we were taking sides, that side. My memory is that I wrote the first article enacting the change. The word exerted a magnetic pull. The text was peppered with black.

The Crimson archives its old issues on line, and I’ve tried to find that piece. I thought it concerned black athletes and that I wrote it in 1967. I had made it onto the news staff the year before through covering a contraception controversy. A fellow named Bill Baird was challenging a Massachusetts law that forbade teaching birth control or supplying devices to unmarried women. Then I wrote about freshman support for Cassius Clay/Mohammed Ali in his draft refusal—there, we chose to lead with "Clay" before switching over. That piece slid me onto the “Harvard Afro” beat and, eventually, the controversy over blacks-only events that the society wanted to hold in university buildings. A Jewish social sciences professor who was neo-con avant la lettre had promised to attend any private African-American gatherings on the grounds that his ancestors had come up out of Egypt.

If there was a 1967 piece, I can’t find it online. But I see scattered examples from 1968. In one, I use black four times in the first two sentences. As I say, the word felt bold. It vibrated on the page.

I started supervising black freshmen trying out for the Crimson. Something I did—I never learned what—got me remembered; years later, I was invited to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the African-American Studies Department. Perhaps recognizing change while it was in progress was enough. I was content to be included.

Today, too. There’s a long road ahead, there are good grounds for worry, including worry about the candidate. It's true that he's relatively untested. He has his weak points. But it would be something to see Obama win it all. If he does, shouldn’t we welcome that revolution with clear prose? Not an African-American, but a black in White House.