Obama candidacy is history in the making for African-Americans

The Top Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net

Barbara Lee was 15 years old when she stepped off a bus and saw history unfold before her eyes.

It was a hot summer day in 1963 in Washington, D.C., where hundreds of thousands of Americans had gathered for the March on Washington to address the nation’s leaders on the subject of civil rights.

What Lee remembers first and foremost about the day was how quiet it was when Martin Luther King Jr. began talking about his dream for a better tomorrow.

Fast forward 45 years, and Lee will be traveling from Staunton to Denver, Colo., to serve as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention for presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Barack Obama, and in so doing will become a witness to history once again, the King speech and Obama nomination serving as bookends for her own journey as an African-American.

“It means we’ve come a long way, and we have a ways to go. But if he goes into that Oval Office, it will change the way American people think,” Lee said.

The Obama candidacy is certainly changing the way even politically active African-Americans are thinking about politics. Lee, for example, has been political since her teen years. “I was at the March on Washington because I was always involved in civil-rights issues, ” she said. Neither is Mary Baldwin College professor Amy Tillerson a stranger to the political scene, though Tillerson admits to being particularly energized by the Obama candidacy. “This is something that I never expected would happen in my lifetime,” said Tillerson, an African-American who is volunteering the limited amount of spare time that she has in her teaching schedule and her schedule as a new mother locally for the Obama campaign.

“A lot of this on my part has to do with how hard it was to obtain the vote, especially for African-Americans and for women. I tell my students and family members that people actually died for the right to vote. And because people gave their life for it, and it is part of connecting with ourselves and our nation, then we have to do it. I feel compelled to do it because of the historical turmoil that the path to voting has taken for African-Americans and women over the course of the past two centuries,” Tillerson said.

Downtown Waynesboro business owner Stacey Strawn has had an Obama ‘08 sign in her front store window since early in the 2008 election cycle. “I’m definitely enthused that Barack Obama is a black man. All of my family and my friends are very excited that Obama is a black man. It’s like being proud of one of your own,” said Strawn, the co-owner of Blue Moon Galleries. “It’s an important step for my nation, it’s an important step for my race, and I’m thrilled to death that finally a black candidate is being taken seriously, and not just taken seriously, but people are excited,” Strawn said.

The excitement of Strawn, Tillerson, Lee and others in the African-American community is evident in polling data that have support for Obama running in the low to mid 90s among African-American voters. The fact that Obama has held a slight but steady lead in the national polls for several weeks – today’s polling by Rasmussen has Obama ahead of McCain by a 45 percent-to-43 percent margin, and Gallup has Obama in the lead by a 47 percent-to-42 percent gap – is only adding to that.

“We do see that our nation is making formidable changes for the better, and we’re happy for that. But with the historic happenings, everything that has gone on that has been particularly discriminatory or racist, and then in 2008 to have an African-American candidate who can actually land the presidency is just phenomenal,” Tillerson said.

“I remember being this excited about one other candidate in my adult life, and that was Bill Clinton, and he’s certainly not black, but I remember people having that same feeling of energy and the air is sort of charged about a person who is personable and well-liked but yet brilliant. And that’s what Obama is, and the fact that he’s black makes it all the better for me,” Strawn said.