Harold Moss knows a thing or two about perseverance. Tacoma's first African-American Mayor and City Council member and the first African-American elected to the Pierce County Council, Moss began working with the Tacoma chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s, served on Tacoma's First Human Relations Commission (now the Human Rights Commission), and in 1968 helped create the Tacoma Urban League. At 81, Moss is still active in the community as a leading figure in the Black Collective. He was born in 1929, the same year as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and while Dr. King was organizing, protesting and inspiring change throughout the nation, Moss was doing the same in Tacoma.

Moss recalls that in Tacoma in the 1950s many restaurants didn't serve blacks, most businesses wouldn't hire blacks and most realtors wouldn't sell to blacks. "Tacoma was a microcosm of the whole country at that time," he explains.

"Now days it's hard to understand what discrimination really was, because back than it was respectable," Moss says. He remembers a Tacoma where it was common practice to refuse service to blacks at restaurants or to sell or rent apartments or homes to blacks. "We had a lot to overcome relating to schools, jobs and healthcare," he says.

Moss explains that even though racism wasn't as rude and far reaching as it was in the South, the NAACP in Tacoma often protested in solidarity with their Southern counterparts. "Even though black people could go to Woolworth here, we couldn't go to Woolworth in North Carolina, so our students here sat in here in empathy with those in the South."

Moss recalls with a soft, proud smile how the Tacoma NAACP would march and disrupt meetings at old City Hall, protesting the lack of African-American representation.

Moss first ran for public office in 1969, and has run many times both unsuccessfully and successfully since then. He recalls how in his early campaigns many residents blatantly protested his candidacy. "When I first ran they used to set fire to my signs and throw them back up on my yard," he says.

He doesn't hide the ugly truth of the racism he saw as Tacoma's first African-American elected official, but says his only option has ever been to persevere. "Part of running (as an African-American) is getting over the reality that you are different and that you are black and you are not always going to be welcome," he explains. "You're going to get a lot of that, but if you aren't tough enough for that, you really aren't tough enough to serve."

Moss remains confident in voters both in Tacoma and nationally. "From here all the way to the president of the United States, if you have ‘it' white folks will vote for you," he says. "If you can connect with them they will connect with you, that has been true from 1970 to now."

Having lived through the assassination of Dr. King and other great civil leaders, enduring many decades of racism and segregation and dedicating his career to civil rights and political leadership, Moss chooses his words carefully when describing the emotions he felt when President Obama was elected. "Electing Obama was more acceptance than anything in the world," says Moss softly. "It was as dramatic a thing as I had ever been through."

"We all stand on the shoulders of other people," he says. "Those who were the pathfinders and those who led the way, those who went through the real crap like Dr. King, Dr. Abernathy and Malcolm X."

Moss explains that rather watch the inauguration with other people, he made arrangements to watch in private. "I wanted to feel and experience what it felt like to have the president of the United States standing on your shoulders," he explains. "It's an awesome thought and it was more emotion than I could handle because of all I had been through."

"The notion that the nation had gone behind closed doors and curtains, or into their kitchens and voted for Barack Obama, Barack Hussein Obama, that was an absolutely unbelievable moment," Moss says.

Moss seems to recall history as if it was yesterday, colorfully and emotionally recalling the civil rights movement, but he says Martin Luther King Jr. Day is also about continuing to progress. He says that there is much work to continue on behalf of the African-American community, but he is quick to point out the ongoing struggle for civil rights being endured by the gay and lesbian and Latino communities. In his mind, the struggles are one in the same.

"It's stupid not to accept the fact that every human being has a right to association, a right to matrimony and the right to be whoever the hell you are, not based on religious beliefs or somebody else's cultural background," he says. "Not in the United States of America."

Experience has taught Moss that change doesn't always happen the way one may have envisioned, but it will come. "When you've got a history like mine you know it's going to come out, it's going to be alright," he says. "It may be different than what you had planned, but in the end we are some great people, every damn one of us, and eventually things come around right."

The City of Tacoma's 2011 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration is scheduled for Monday, January 17, 2011, at the Tacoma Dome Exhibition Hall. Doors Open at 10 a.m. and the event will take place between 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. at the Tacoma Dome Exhibition Hall, 2727 E. D Street. TV Tacoma will broadcast the celebration live at 11 a.m. on the Web site www.tvtacoma.com and on cable Channel 12 in Tacoma and on Channel 21 in most areas of Pierce County.