A civil-rights footnote to Barack’s St. Paul breakfast stop

When it comes to Barack Obama, expected to be endorsed as the first major-party African-American candidate for president, there’s a tendency to see things through the lens of race. Like his breakfast in St. Paul this morning. His selected café, the Copper Dome, comes with an interesting civil-rights footnote: its long-time co-owner, the late Ernie Horowitz, is the father-in-law of Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizer, Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder and former NAACP president Julian Bond.

In a 2004 NAACP speech, Bond paid homage to the father of his wife, Washington attorney Pamela Horowitz, offering a fascinating, if brief, history of the restaurant’s co-founder:

My father-in-law grew up as poor as poor can be. When World War II began, he was the first man in Minnesota called for the draft. He landed on Utah Beach in Normandy two days after D-Day, and several days after that, was shot by a German sniper. That ended his war, but it didn’t end his life. He became a successful restaurateur, and we buried him with military honors on June 9th.

Alas, this civil-rights connection didn’t have any bearing on Obama’s choice of breakfast spot. "That’s exactly what I asked," said Copper Dome manager Linda Weiss. But, she was told, it was just coincidence.