Washington DC: Obama’s election day
The New King
Scotland on Sunday, November 9, 2008
Kenny Farquharson spent US election day — from dawn until well after dusk — with Washington’s black community as they hoped, waited, prayed and then celebrated the momentous event that changed the course of history
It is dawn in America, but at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC the sun has not yet broken through the clouds. On the local TV news, the weather forecaster has been struggling to make an accurate prediction. She says a storm might hit the city later on, or it might just pass us by. Today, election day, will be one long wait to see if the worst is going to happen. The statue of the president who freed the slaves is a study in dignity and courage. It is a sermon in stone. Inscribed on a nearby wall is the Gettysburg Address with its promise to build “a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”. Lincoln’s eyes stare out towards the Washington Memorial and the dome of the Capitol beyond. His face seems caught between scowl and smile.
A few steps down from the statue is a much smaller inscription, easily missed unless you are looking for it. Carved in the marble floor, it reads: “I have a dream.” On this spot, Martin Luther King made his famous speech on August 28, 1963, in front of 200,000 people, looking forward to a day when a black man would not be judged by the colour of his skin but on the content of his character.
Will today be that day? Will America make King’s dream come true by choosing a black man for the White House?
It is barely 7am and too early for tourists. Yet gazing up at Lincoln is an African-American woman wearing a college sweatshirt. “There he is,” she says, as if she has just found an old friend. Terra Dews is a 36-year-old research administrator from Blacksburg, Virginia, who is in town for a conference. She cast her vote a few days ago back home, choosing Democratic candidate Barack Obama for president.
I ask her what Lincoln means to her. “Freedom,” she says, “given where I come from.” And Obama? “Freedom too. This is an emotional day for me. He represents a new direction for this country.” She wants Obama to win primarily for her 11-year-old son Adrian. Her eyes mist a little as she talks about her boy. “Obama as president is a role model he can aspire to,” she says. “It’ll show him he can get to wherever he wants to go in his life. Just now he wants to be an astronaut, but we’ll see…”
She raises her eyes to Lincoln once more. On second thoughts, maybe his look is actually more smile than scowl.
“AW, I LOVE THIS SONG,” says Aba Tyus, and she turns up the radio in her beaten-up Toyota. It’s an R&B band called Sounds of Blackness singing a sentimental upbeat number called “Hold On, Change is Coming”. She starts to click her fingers and hum along, moving to the music while at the same time punching a number into her BlackBerry and driving at speed through crazy DC traffic.
Tyus is a 21-year-old economics graduate from Spelman College, Atlanta, a black women’s university that operates under the slogan: “A choice to change the world.” She is working as manager of the Washington office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organisation that came to prominence in the civil rights era but which has been campaigning for equality and representation for African Americans since 1909, helping outlaw the lynching of blacks and the desegregation of the military. In the back seat of the Toyota is a pile of signs displaying the NAACP slogan: “Power. Justice. Freedom.”
For weeks, Tyus has been taking calls from voters who have been on full alert about possible irregularities at the polls, or those simply worried that they will be denied their chance to vote. In this election, of all elections, black people want their say and many are worried that malign forces in American society will try to stop them. With vigilance comes anxiety. “I do my best to respond to the complaints that come in,” she says. “The phone’s ringing all day from 7am. Their fear is that their voice won’t be heard, that they’ll be disenfranchised.” She believes in her work. “It’s important for me to be here, and to know I’ve contributed.”
Last night, she travelled to Virginia to see Obama speak at a rally that drew 100,000 people. “He was just a dot, but I saw him.” She got home after 1am and was back in the NAACP office answering calls just after 7am.
Now we are on our way to an old folks’ home where 90 people want to vote but have no means of getting to the polling station. The NAACP has laid on a bus, and Tyus is going to make sure everyone who wants to gets on it.
The Carver Senior Mansion is a modern red-brick home for 140 elderly black people, with women vastly outnumbering the men. Most of those wanting to vote are already on the bus, where there is an air of seriousness bordering on solemnity. This isn’t an outing. This is important work.
In the lobby, some women who have already voted are comparing what they were like as young girls. “I used to drink, but I wasn’t a drinker,” says one. “Honey, smokin’ and drinkin’ is something I never done,” says another disapprovingly. “My thing was the club,” says a third. “Dancin’ and partyin’ and dressin’.” “Mmm-hmm!” say all three, remembering how gorgeous they looked, back in the day.
Laverne Baum, a retired teaching assistant, is resplendent in a purple velour tracksuit. “I’m 65 but I know I don’t look it,” she says with a coquettish smile. “Even though I’ve had two dead children and two dead husbands. You just got to give it up to the Lord. I didn’t own them — the Lord just lent them to me. I’ll see them on the other side — but I don’t want that to be too soon, y’understand.”
Why had she voted for Obama? “It’s not because of colour,” she says. “It’s because he has more to offer us. He’s going to tax the rich and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
Her friend is Geraldine Hall, 67, a former housekeeper who has her hair dyed orange. “I ain’t ashamed to tell you, I voted for Obama. I like what he’s preachin’. But only God can make the change. And he’s going to make it. God is tellin’ him what to do, because the Earth is the Lord’s. God said the first shall be last and the last first. So this is God who is changing this around.”
In search of God’s view, I drop in on America’s foremost black church, the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church on M Street, the oldest black-owned building in the capital. Rosa Parks’s funeral was held here, as were the two official prayer services before Bill Clinton’s inaugurations. On the wall outside the Rev Ronald Braxton’s office is a print of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The last Supper. Do a double-take and you discover something curious about it — all the disciples, and Jesus too, are black, with African facial features.
Braxton is a quiet man with greying hair, an upright bearing and a pinstripe suit. “In the African-American community, this is perhaps the greatest landmark in our entire history on American shores,” he says of Obama’s moment. “Our ancestors who came here not as free people but as slaves, had no concept that this day was possible. Our grandparents never even imagined this. I don’t believe Martin Luther King could ever imagine that this day would ever come. He never talked about anything like that… It is not a culminating moment. It is not an answer to the many problems we face as a country or as a people. But for us it is a landmark moment.”
In his church’s book of service, Hymn 162 is called “The Strife is O’er, The Battle Done”. But the Rev Braxton cautions against any complacency that racism is defeated in America. Referring to John McCain’s last-minute rally in the opinion polls, Braxton says he knows full well what this represents. “It wasn’t so much about political issues. I think what we were seeing was actually white America stepping up, and saying I’m just not going to let that happen. Their true colour came out. People are coming out of the caves, of the woodwork, from the trees, they’re coming from everywhere.”
Like most of the people I’m speaking to today, Braxton cannot hide his anxiety. Despite the polls, despite the predictions, they are refusing to let themselves believe this is going to happen, that America could have its first black president. Surely it will be snatched away from them. Surely they will be denied.
TO FIND THE HEART OF Washington’s black community, you must find U Street, a strip of bars, music venues, Ethiopian restaurants and black businesses in the north east of the city once known as “the Black Broadway”. Here you’ll find the Bohemian Caverns, where the performers have included Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Billie Holiday. At Ben’s Chili Bowl, an iconic eatery, there is a sign that says: “Our chilli will make a hot dog bark.” And when it comes to their 3.60 chilli dog, they ain’t fooling. On the front door today is a simple notice that says: “Please vote.”
There used to be a sign above the counter headed: “People who can eat free at Ben’s.” It had just one name, the restaurant’s most famous regular, Bill Cosby. Today it has a new addition underneath: “The Obama Family.”
Outside, a small man in a Washington Redskins cap is speaking to a friend who is the size of a small car. Has he voted yet, he asks. “Sure,” the big man replies. “I voted for the next president of the United States of America — John McCain.” The two men and everyone within earshot all fall about laughing and there is much slapping of backs.
Nearby is a cramped law office that has been commandeered by the Obama campaign. A dozen women are hunched over phones, making calls to get out the vote. On the walls are hand-made posters, many of them the work of children. “Obama is love!” “Barack the vote!” “Yes We Can!” All the activity is being co-ordinated by a black woman called Sammie, who is wearing an enormous snakeskin stetson.
“Our generation messed it up,” she said, “so it’s time for us to support the young people and let him fix it. During the civil rights movement, things were achieved, but people stopped watching at the gate. We kinda dropped the ball and didn’t make the right decisions. Either we were distracted or we were drinking Kool-Aid. But we’ve got young people here now who are right on the mark, and we have to be supportive of change that will preserve this country.”
An elderly black man is in charge of dishing out bumper stickers and signs, while a cassette recorder plays old-school soul. “Listen to that song,” he orders one young woman when a particular love song comes on. She does what she is told. When the last notes die away he says to her: “Now go home and sing that to your husband.”
On a corner of U Street is a memorial to the 209,145 African Americans who fought for the Union side in the American Civil War. It shows grim-faced young blacks in uniform, rifles in their hands. All that remains of them are the names engraved here — men like Outlaw Hinton, Pool Hopewell and Andrew Gordon of the 5th Regiment US Colored Heavy Artillery. In an adjacent museum, curator Hari Jones argues that there is a direct line to be drawn from these men’s sacrifice to Obama’s election today.
Obama, he says, is in a long and neglected tradition of African-Americans who did not reject the system, but worked within it and respected the constitution. Jones, a 50-year-old former Marine officer who has swapped his military buzzcut for dreadlocks, has nothing but scorn for the likes of Malcolm X and the leaders of the Pan Africanist movement who told blacks that America could never work for them.
That attitude, he says, has long been prevalent in black colleges. “African American professors would not even teach the story of these soldiers. It didn’t fit their recruitment agenda. They were recruiting those who would say the constitution is pro-slavery and it’s the slavery of your oppressor and you’re not an American. Which is really interesting because that same argument comes from the Ku Klux Klan.”
Across the African-American community, says Jones, there are radical academics and artists who fear the damage an Obama presidency will do to their view of the world. “Not only are they not convinced about him, they don’t want to see this moment happen. If this happens then what they have been arguing is wrong.”
Some of those Jones has in his sights ply their trade at Howard University, one of America’s most prestigious seats of black learning. Howard is set on a hill in the north-east of Washington andhas the look and feel of an English red-brick university — except with no white faces.
Dr Alvin Thornton, the university’s Associate Provost and a noted specialist in education policy, is one of Howard’s most respected voices. Obama, he says, is a man for his time. But that doesn’t mean to say his approach is better than that of the African Americans who preceded him. “Obama has tried not to be judgemental about the prior generation — my generation for example — about the strategies and approaches we had to use, because his approach 50 years ago would not have been relevant. It would not have made any sense. You had to have a Martin King approach or a Jesse Jackson approach. The approach of Obama, while very appropriate now, would have been laughable 50 years ago.”
Thornton calls Obama “a quote-unquote black American”, doing the inverted comma sign with his fingers when he says it. I ask why. “He wasn’t raised by black people; he wasn’t born to a black mother; and he spent scant moments with his black father — his black African father, even. So it’s difficult to say he’s black.
“What makes him black is not so much his physiological make-up; what makes him black is that he identifies with an agenda of issues that have been aligned with the black communities’ evolution in this nation — justice, equality, inclusion and democracy. That’s what makes him black. Obama is blacker in that sense than he is physiologically.”
African Americans who question his blackness, and who are reserving judgement on him, have a right to do so, says Thornton. “That group has a right to question, because he will be president of the United States. And for generations the American constitutional economic system has not done well for a segment of the black population. Obama will be president of that system as well as that nation. So he will have to fundamentally change it, responding to the most needy part of the black community, or for that matter, the most needy part of the white community.”
And if he doesn’t, will there be a backlash from the black community? “Of course there will be and so there should be.”
THE STORM HAS ARRIVED. Rain lashes Washington’s streets. On K Street, epicentre of the biggest lobbying industry in the world, a queue has formed at a flash new venue called Busboys & Poets. Here tonight, the NAACP is holding a viewing party to watch the results coming in. The venue has only recently opened and it features a large stylised artwork with the face of Obama. The NAACP is meant to be a non-partisan body, but given that their purpose is “the advancement of colored people”, this is a night when they could be forgiven for taking sides.
Inside are Washington’s black elite — NAACP donors, Howard alumni, election volunteers and prominent local artists, all in their finery for the occasion. The event oozes glamour. The day’s anxiety is starting to slip away, aided by a glass of free chardonnay. In its place steadily grows an atmosphere of the purest pride and joy.
On large TV screens, the American news pundits are being parsimonious with their numbers, perhaps because of past errors in 2000 and 2004. It’s not until 8.44pm that CNN makes its predication for the key state of Pennsylvania. The room is shushed to silence. CNN gives it to Obama by the extraordinary margin of 65 per cent to 34 per cent (with Ralph Nader and Bob Barr taking 1 per cent). The room goes crazy. There are whoops and laughter. Arms are flung around friends, colleagues and even white Scotsmen. There are some tears. Now they can believe.
At that same moment, that same belief is being felt in hearts across America. And felt no less profoundly in countries an ocean or two away, where people have stayed up to watch the results come in. Belief, after all, is infectious.
I catch sight of a woman I know only as Miss Judy, an NAACP executive council member who I had seen taking charge of the organisation’s Washington office early in the day with a sternness and authority that brooked absolutely no dissent. She now wears a beatific smile, which seems to turn her into another person entirely.
The NAACP’s new chief, 35-year-old Oxford-educated Ben Jealous, is now in the curious position of having to persuade the country there is still a battle to be fought against racism and to secure advances for African Americans.
“We celebrate the smashing of any glass ceiling, but we are not the National Association for the Advancement of A Colored Person,” he says. “What decides whether we go out of business or not is the condition of the people at the grassroots, and they are still hurting.”
Jealous believes the election is landmark in more ways than one. “We all win today. We have had our first multi-racial, multi-gender, multi-generational presidential race. And finally we all feel we can compete on the great stage of politics.”
Two young men in their 20s are sat at a table nearby. Their names are Prince, who teaches children with special needs, and Alonzo, an accountant.
“My whole life my parents told me I could be anything,” says Alonzo. “And I believed it — but I never thought I could be president. Or that any African American could be president. I knew I could be an athlete or a rapper or an entertainer or a doctor or a lawyer. Now I know it’s true.” But there’s a downside. “Now my mom can say to me: why aren’t you president! I wanted to be the First Mother of the country!”
For Prince, Obama’s campaign has made him realise a truth about his potential. “If we put our minds to it and if we put in the hard work and perseverance, we can actually do what we want to do. It has caused me to refocus on my capabilities and everything I want to do in life. I’m a special educator just now but I’ve applied for law school and I’m just waiting to hear back. So this has been good for me.”
I AM REMINDED of an Obama speech I’d heard earlier in the day on the radio in Aba Tyus’s car, which had been given a rap-beat backing. In it, Obama recalls how, on a wet night early in his campaign, when only 20 people turned up to hear him speak, he was feeling low and irritable. But he had his mood transformed by an old woman in the audience chanting “fired up!” and “ready to go!”.
“One voice can change a room,” he said, “and if it can change a room it can change a city, and if it can change a city it can change a state, and if it can change a state it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation it can change the world. Let’s go change the world!”
I wondered what changes Prince and Alonzo would make in their own lives and the lives around them, taking their cue from Obama’s example. And how many more people — in America, in Scotland, in Kenya and all around the world — would be inspired to find and trust their own voices.
People get ready. There’s a change coming.
