Oct. 20, 2008–”Would black people riot if Sen. Barack Obama didn’t win the election?” That was the question a white man in Memphis recently asked a racial reconciliation group with which I am involved.

After five years of being a columnist for the daily paper in Memphis, I wasn’t surprised by the absurdity of his query. Many whites still labor under the illusion that black folk act en masse and that if you ask the right one, you can get the official position of some 40 million people. If a few of us get angry, that logic allows, it must surely result in a riot.

Riot because we didn’t get our way? Please. Black people have more than their share of experience with disappointment and dashed dreams. (See: King, Martin Luther; Evers, Medgar; Chaney, James.) Matter of fact, I’d go so far as to say we’re experts in making the best out of a losing hand.

The reply to the curious white gentleman: “No! There is no reason to believe black people will riot if Obama does not win.”

But soon after getting this man’s e-mail, I started to wonder if he was on to something, if he had noticed what I had: a seething, barely constrained, ugly anger and frustration that makes good riot fuel. The kind of anger that prompts people to shout “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” at rallies. The kind of hatefulness that would prompt a man to bring a stuffed monkey with an “Obama” sticker on the toy’s head to a campaign event.

That kind of group-fueled nastiness must surely beg the question: Will white people riot if Obama wins?

Not all white people are McCain supporters. (See caucuses, Iowa.) Not all black people are backing Obama. (See Negroes, self-loathing. Just joking.)

But there is a small but vocal segment of white Republicans who just might have an aneurysm if the next occupant of the White House is a black man.

If the polls are accurate—and Obama wins—will these few angry white people make good on their oral declarations? And will those who stood by them silent, join them? With dreams deferred, can angry whites do what Langston Hughes taught us—to let it fester like a sore, even to let sag like a heavy load? Or will the dream of a perfect streak of white men in the White House, if deferred, cause white people to explode?

Might they torch stores and overturn cars? Or worse, will angry whites take out their disgust on black people by, say, denying loans, or jobs or housing? Burned-out stores and cars, that’s unsettling. But the damage angry whites could inflict if they really go off—that’s scary.

Will angry white people riot if Barack Obama wins the election?

There may be some people who think this is an absurd question. I honestly don’t know. But it is no more absurd than asking it about blacks.

Wendi C. Thomas is the metro columnist for The Commercial Appeal. She’s been a writer or an editor for The Charlotte Observer, The (Nashville) Tennessean and The Indianapolis Star. Among her many journalism awards is her 2008 induction into the Scripps Howard Hall of Fame for her opinion writing.

Geraldine Britt with fiance James Nickson.

Nov. 4, 2008–

Geraldine Britt

Silver Spring, Md.

When you get older, you like to think you’ve seen it all. Nothing can surprise you. Well, week after week during this presidential campaign—even after I should have gotten used to it—Barack Obama’s ascendency surprised me. At age 84, I have hundreds of memories of conflict between whites and blacks. Who knew so many people, white and black, would support a black presidential candidate?

And yet today I stood in line and voted for Barack Obama. I lived a day I never thought I’d see. For the first time in my life, I felt I was a part of history. I’ve lived through the Depression, World War II, the civil rights movement—but this was different. It was as if my one vote was multiplied—I didn’t feel like I was alone. To vote for a somebody who knows what it’s like to have suffered being African American in this country. Who isn’t part of that society that always thinks that what they think and see and want is what should be. So many people can feel it—because white and brown and Asian people identify with this man, too. I felt I was part of a force that is earth-shattering.

You have to have lived it to understand. It’s like ice cream—someone can tell you that it’s cold and sweet but until you taste it, it has no meaning.

My grandmother was born four years after slavery ended. She was herding cows at age 9 with no shoes; she would wait for a cow to get up and stand there to warm her feet. Life was work and work and work. … Like most black women then, she worked as a maid—”at service,” as she called it. She was the cook and downstairs maid for white family in Media, Pa., the Darlingtons. She walked five blocks to work, though the Darlingtons had two cars. I said, “Nana, they would drive you home.” And she said, “Never let white people know what you’ve got.” She couldn’t let them know she had scrimped to buy a nine-room brick house.

I remember the pride people had those days, even if you were a maid. Nana often said, “If it’s good for them, it’s good for me.” So if the Darlingtons had sterling silverware, ours was plated. It’s appalling how so many people, black and white, have lost the sense of pride. I think Obama instills it in people. In truth, he’s not the only Obama in America. We have thousands of eloquent black doctors and lawyers and teachers and professors—but those people aren’t in the sights of millions of white people.

In the 1940s, when I graduated from Temple University, I was invited to a white instructor’s apartment in a Philadelphia high-rise. When I walked into the building, a doorman asked why I was there. When I told him, he politely turned me around, took me through the kitchen and up the back steps to her apartment. I couldn’t go through the front door—and this was in Philadelphia, the “cradle of liberty.” All the wonderful feelings I had about Temple disappeared. Things like that taught you never to trust white people.

So you would have thought black people would throw their arms around a candidate like Obama. But it took a while to for them to embrace him. Black people are weary. And wary. I don’t mean they’re wary of Barack, but of the system. Before Obama, black people were tired of hoping. Barack Obama inspires people to hope, and that’s scary. With his brilliance and charm and desire for great change—does he realize the bull he’s taken by the horns?.

When I first saw Barack, he was running for the Senate in Illinois. You could tell he was bright. He had the bearing of an aristocrat, but talked like a common denominator. I thought, “He could be one of the ones to make a change.” America needs him.

I’m glad he came at a time when he could walk through the front door—of the White House.

**********

Emebeat Bekele

Washington, D.C

Before Election Day it was all about Barack. But today, when I was standing in line to cast my vote, I saw all those people with wheelchairs and walkers standing in line, too. It made me realize it was about more than Barack. I realized how big this thing is: It’s overwhelming huge! All those people, standing on line, determined.

In the beginning it was just like “We have to get him elected.” But when I cast my vote, I felt it wasn’t about Barack; it was about democracy. It was about making people equal and empowering every single person.

It gives me the assertion that people are ultimately powerful. It doesn’t matter if you’re poor or if you’re Bill Gates—everyone gets one vote. I feel like democracy is really in play and the fact that so many people are exercising democracy—all those people standing on line—is just a wonderful feeling.

I just want this feeling of empowerment to go on forever. The young people, I hope they never forget this. These politicians spend all this money to get these votes.

This has gone beyond him. He started the process. Barack and his campaign have started a movement. He gave us a shared purpose.

Once he’s elected, I feel like the entire world is going to change. Because it’s not just about Barack Obama. It’s not just about one person. This movement is a movement. It will be a phenomenon that will be duplicated worldwide.

**********

Jimmie Howard

Atlanta

My day began with me waking up this morning around 10 a.m. with a feeling of responsibility. So after taking a shower and getting dressed, I began walking to my polling place, Miller Grove Jr. High School in Decatur, Ga.

On my way there, I began to prepare myself for a long line of voters. To my surprise, there weren’t many people there after all. In one way, I was excited because that meant that I would be in and out in no time. In another way, I was wondering if people actually got their butts out of bed to go vote. The volunteers said that they had a big crowd earlier in the morning, but I felt like there are too many people in this area for it to not be crowded all day long. Hopefully, people didn’t buy into the media hype about Obama being so far ahead and decide that their vote wouldn’t matter.

On a positive note, it felt good to see other young black males doing the same thing as me, walking down the street to cast their votes. I ran into one guy who looked like he was barely old enough to vote. He had on a Domino’s Pizza uniform, so he was probably headed to vote before going to work. He stopped me to ask if I knew where Miller Grove Jr. High was located, and I said, “You’re headed in the right direction. Just keep going.”

America is headed in the right direction, so we just have to keep going. I know for me, it felt good to show off my sticker that says, “I am proud to be a Georgia Voter.” Home of the brave.

**********

L. Sonny Young and wife, Beverly

Springfield, Ohio

I am very excited at this time in my life about the part that my wife, Beverly, and I are playing in this 2008 election. It is an honor to have my business, a beauty salon, be the Southside Obama campaign headquarters for the city of Springfield, Ohio. In our southwest corner of the state, the population is heavily Republican. Beverly and I have been so excited to work for a man who we believe will be a great leader for our country. Each time I have heard him on the TV and radio, he has inspired me to want to do even more to help him become our next commander in chief.

I missed an opportunity to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak the night before the 1963 March on Washington. There was a big test coming up at school. But I am making up for it now. I have been working hard to turn Clark County into Obama country. I am 62 now, and I feel like I’m fulfilling something that I wasn’t able to fulfill when I was 17. I’ve been talking up Obama everywhere—even with my doctor. I was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer, and my doctor is a Republican. After I spent 15 minutes at one of my appointments trying to recruit him, he actually pointed to my Obama cap and said, “Where can I get one of those hats?” I took one to him on my next appointment. After the procedure, I handed the hat to the doctor. He gave me $50 and said, “Just consider that a contribution to the Obama campaign.” I have registered about 500 people over the last four months.

As I sit here in my campaign headquarters, watching all of the continuous activity of workers, I become more anxious and convinced that what we are doing is the right thing. Over the past few months, I cannot tell you how many times I have chanted, “Yes, we can.” Tonight, we’ll all see that.

**********

Nov. 5, 2008

Dear Brother Obama,

You have no idea, really, of how profound this moment is for us. Us being the black people of the Southern United States. You think you know, because you are thoughtful, and you have studied our history. But seeing you deliver the torch so many others before you carried, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, only to be struck down before igniting the flame of justice and of law, is almost more than the heart can bear. And yet, this observation is not intended to burden you, for you are of a different time, and, indeed, because of all the relay runners before you, North America is a different place. It is really only to say: Well done. We knew, through all the generations, that you were with us, in us, the best of the spirit of Africa and of the Americas. Knowing this, that you would actually appear, someday, was part of our strength. Seeing you take your rightful place, based solely on your wisdom, stamina and character, is a balm for the weary warriors of hope, previously only sung about.

I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters. And so on. One gathers that your family is large. We are used to seeing men in the White House soon become juiceless and as white-haired as the building; we notice their wives and children looking strained and stressed. They soon have smiles so lacking in joy that they remind us of scissors. This is no way to lead. Nor does your family deserve this fate. One way of thinking about all this is: It is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is all that so many people in the world really want. They may buy endless cars and houses and furs and gobble up all the attention and space they can manage, or barely manage, but this is because it is not yet clear to them that success is truly an inside job. That it is within the reach of almost everyone.

I would further advise you not to take on other people’s enemies. Most damage that others do to us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion. We must learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise. It is understood by all that you are commander in chief of the United States and are sworn to protect our beloved country; this we understand, completely. However, as my mother used to say, quoting a Bible with which I often fought, “hate the sin, but love the sinner.” There must be no more crushing of whole communities, no more torture, no more dehumanizing as a means of ruling a people’s spirit. This has already happened to people of color, poor people, women, children. We see where this leads, where it has led.

A good model of how to “work with the enemy” internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet. Because, finally, it is the soul that must be preserved, if one is to remain a credible leader. All else might be lost; but when the soul dies, the connection to earth, to peoples, to animals, to rivers, to mountain ranges, purple and majestic, also dies. And your smile, with which we watch you do gracious battle with unjust characterizations, distortions and lies, is that expression of healthy self-worth, spirit and soul, that, kept happy and free and relaxed, can find an answering smile in all of us, lighting our way, and brightening the world.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

In Peace and Joy,
Alice Walker

President-elect Barack Obama

We have all heard stories about those few magical transformative moments in African-American history, extraordinary ritual occasions through which the geographically and socially diverse black community—a nation within a nation, really—molds itself into one united body, determined to achieve one great social purpose and to bear witness to the process by which this grand achievement occurs.

The first time was New Year’s Day in 1863, when tens of thousands of black people huddled together all over the North waiting to see if Abraham Lincoln would sign the Emancipation Proclamation. The second was the night of June 22, 1938, the storied rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, when black families and friends crowded around radios to listen and cheer as the Brown Bomber knocked out Schmeling in the first round. The third, of course, was Aug. 28, 1963, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed to the world that he had a dream, in the shadow of a brooding Lincoln, peering down on the assembled throng, while those of us who couldn’t be with him in Washington sat around our black-and-white television sets, bound together by King’s melodious voice through our tears and with quickened-flesh.

But we have never seen anything like this. Nothing could have prepared any of us for the eruption (and, yes, that is the word) of spontaneous celebration that manifested itself in black homes, gathering places and the streets of our communities when Sen. Barack Obama was declared President-elect Obama. From Harlem to Harvard, from Maine to Hawaii—and even Alaska—from “the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire … [to] Stone Mountain of Georgia,” as Dr. King put it, each of us will always remember this moment, as will our children, whom we woke up to watch history being made.

My colleagues and I laughed and shouted, whooped and hollered, hugged each other and cried. My father waited 95 years to see this day happen, and when he called as results came in, I silently thanked God for allowing him to live long enough to cast his vote for the first black man to become president. And even he still can’t quite believe it!

How many of our ancestors have given their lives—how many millions of slaves toiled in the fields in endlessly thankless and mindless labor—before this generation could live to see a black person become president? “How long, Lord?” the spiritual goes; “not long!” is the resounding response. What would Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois say if they could know what our people had at long last achieved? What would Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman say? What would Dr. King himself say? Would they say that all those lost hours of brutalizing toil and labor leading to spent, half-fulfilled lives, all those humiliations that our ancestors had to suffer through each and every day, all those slights and rebuffs and recriminations, all those rapes and murders, lynchings and assassinations, all those Jim Crow laws and protest marches, those snarling dogs and bone-breaking water hoses, all of those beatings and all of those killings, all of those black collective dreams deferred—that the unbearable pain of all of those tragedies had, in the end, been assuaged at least somewhat through Barack Obama’s election? This certainly doesn’t wipe that bloody slate clean. His victory is not redemption for all of this suffering; rather, it is the symbolic culmination of the black freedom struggle, the grand achievement of a great, collective dream. Would they say that surviving these horrors, hope against hope, was the price we had to pay to become truly free, to live to see—exactly 389 years after the first African slaves landed on these shores—that “great gettin’ up morning” in 2008 when a black man—Barack Hussein Obama—was elected the first African-American president of the United States?

I think they would, resoundingly and with one voice proclaim, “Yes! Yes! And yes, again!” I believe they would tell us that it had been worth the price that we, collectively, have had to pay—the price of President-elect Obama’s ticket.

On that first transformative day, when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Frederick Douglass, the greatest black orator in our history before Martin Luther King Jr., said that the day was not a day for speeches and “scarcely a day for prose.” Rather, he noted, “it is a day for poetry and song, a new song.” Over 3,000 people, black and white abolitionists together, waited for the news all day in Tremont Temple, a Baptist church a block from Boston Common. When a messenger burst in, after 11 p.m., and shouted, “It is coming! It is on the wires,” the church went mad; Douglass recalled that “I never saw enthusiasm before. I never saw joy.” And then he spontaneously led the crowd in singing “Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow,” John Brown’s favorite hymn:

Blow ye the trumpet, blow!

The gladly solemn sound

Let all the nations know,

To earth’s remotest bound:

The year of jubilee is come!

The year of jubilee is come!

Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.

In Our Lifetime

At that moment, an entire race, one that in 1863 in the United States comprised 4.4 million souls, became a unified people, breathing with one heart, speaking with one voice, united in mind and spirit, all their aspirations concentrated into a laser beam of almost blind hope and desperate anticipation.

It is astounding to think that many of us today—myself included—can remember when it was a huge deal for a black man or woman to enter the White House through the front door, and not through the servants’ entrance. Paul Cuffe, the wealthy sea captain, shipping merchant, and the earliest “Back to Africa” black colonist, will forever have the distinction of being the first black person to be invited to the White House for an audience with the president. Cuffe saw President James Madison at the White House on May 2, 1812, at precisely 11 a.m. and asked the president’s intervention in recovering his famous brig Traveller, which had been impounded because officials said he had violated the embargo with Britain. Cuffe, after the Quaker fashion, called Madison “James”; “James,” in turn, got Paul’s brig back for him, probably because Cuffe and Madison both favored the emigration of freed slaves back to Africa. (Three years later, on Dec. 10, 1815, Cuffe used this ship to carry 38 black people from the United States to Sierra Leone.)

From Frederick Douglass, who visited Lincoln three times during his presidency (and every president thereafter until his death in 1895), to Soujourner Truth and Booker T. Washington, each prominent black visitor to the White House caused people to celebrate another “victory for the race.” Blacks became frequent visitors to Franklin Roosevelt’s White House; FDR even had a “Kitchen Cabinet” through which blacks could communicate the needs of their people. Because of the civil rights movement, Lyndon Johnson had a slew of black visitors, as well. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, I attended a White House reception with so many black political, academic and community leaders that it occurred to me that there hadn’t been as many black people in the Executive Mansion perhaps since slavery. Everyone laughed at the joke, because they knew, painfully, that it was true.

Visiting the White House is one thing; occupying the White House is quite another. And yet, African-American aspirations to the White House date back generations. The first black man put forward on a ticket as a political party’s nominee for U.S. president was George Edwin Taylor, on the National Liberty Party ticket in 1904. Portions of his campaign document could have been written by Barack Obama:

“… in the light of the history of the past four years, with a Republican president in the executive chair, and both branches of Congress and a majority of the Supreme Court of the same political faith, we are confronted with the amazing fact that more than one-fifth of the race are actually disfranchised, robbed of all the rights, powers and benefits of true citizenship, we are forced to lay aside our prejudices, indeed, our personal wishes, and consult the higher demands of our manhood, the true interests of the country and our posterity, and act while we yet live, ‘ere the time when it shall be too late. No other race of our strength would have quietly submitted to what we have during the past four years without a rebellion, a revolution, or an uprising.”

The revolution that Taylor goes on to propose, he says, is one “not by physical force, but by the ballot,” with the ultimate sign of the success being the election of the nation’s first black president.

But given all of the racism to which black people were subjected following Reconstruction and throughout the first half of the 20th century, no one could actually envision a Negro becoming president—”not in our lifetimes,” as our ancestors used to say. When James Earl Jones became America’s first black fictional president in the 1972 film, “The Man,” I remember thinking, “Imagine that!” His character, Douglass Dilman, the president pro tempore of the Senate, ascends to the presidency after the president and the speaker of the House are killed in a building collapse, and after the vice president declines the office due to advanced age and ill health. A fantasy if ever there was one, we thought. But that year, life would imitate art: Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm attempted to transform “The Man” into “The Woman,” becoming the first black woman to run for president in the Democratic Party. She received 152 first-ballot votes at the Democratic National Convention. Then, in 1988, Jesse Jackson got 1,219 delegate votes at the Democratic convention, 29 percent of the total, coming in second only to the nominee, Michael Dukakis.

The award for prescience, however, goes to Jacob K. Javits, the liberal Republican senator from New York who, incredibly, just a year after the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, predicted that the first black president would be elected in the year 2000. In an essay titled “Integration from the Top Down” printed in Esquire magazine in 1958, he wrote:

“What manner of man will this be, this possible Negro Presidential candidate of 2000? Undoubtedly, he will be well-educated. He will be well-traveled and have a keen grasp of his country’s role in the world and its relationships. He will be a dedicated internationalist with working comprehension of the intricacies of foreign aid, technical assistance and reciprocal trade. … Assuredly, though, despite his other characteristics, he will have developed the fortitude to withstand the vicious smear attacks that came his way as he fought to the top in government and politics … those in the vanguard may expect to be the targets for scurrilous attacks, as the hate mongers, in the last ditch efforts, spew their verbal and written poison.”

In the same essay, Javits predicted both the election of a black senator and the appointment of the first black Supreme Court justice by 1968. Edward Brooke was elected to the Senate by Massachusetts voters in 1966. Thurgood Marshall was confirmed in 1967. Javits also predicted that the House of Representatives would have “between thirty and forty qualified Negroes” in the 106th Congress in 2000. In fact, there were 37 black U.S. representatives, among them 12 women.

Sen. Javits was one very keen prognosticator. When we consider the characteristics that he insisted the first black president must possess—he must be well-educated, well-traveled, have a keen grasp of his country’s role in the world, be a dedicated internationalist and have a very thick skin—it is astonishing how accurately he is describing the background and character of Barack Obama.

I wish we could say that Barack Obama’s election will magically reduce the numbers of teenage pregnancies or the level of drug addiction in the black community. I wish we could say that what happened last night will suddenly make black children learn to read and write as if their lives depended on it, and that their high school completion rates will become the best in the country. I wish we could say that these things are about to happen, but I doubt that they will.

But there is one thing we can proclaim today, without question: that the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States of America means that “The Ultimate Color Line,” as the subtitle of Javits’ Esquire essay put it, has, at long last, been crossed. It has been crossed by our very first postmodern Race Man, a man who embraces his African cultural and genetic heritage so securely that he can transcend it, becoming the candidate of choice to tens of millions of Americans who do not look like him.

How does that make me feel? Like I’ve always imagined my father and his friends felt back in 1938, on the day that Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling. But ten thousand times better than that. All I can say is “Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound.”

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Dats Jus Swift
producer/composer/turntable technician/sound designer
[ADULT SWIM] – Cartoon network
“ii Know Where Hip Hop Lives”
“Ask Dangerous Lee”
The Brown Study
Bellerophon Music Group, llc.
Unseen Heard Productions
www.myspace.com/datsjusswift
www.datsjusswiftmusic.wordpress.com

Dats Jus Swift
producer/composer/turntable technician/sound designer
[ADULT SWIM] – Cartoon network
“ii Know Where Hip Hop Lives”
“Ask Dangerous Lee”
The Brown Study
Bellerophon Music Group, llc.
Unseen Heard Productions
www.myspace.com/datsjusswift
www.datsjusswiftmusic.wordpress.com

A 28-year-old Overland Park woman shared her fight against breast cancer with KMBC’s Lara Moritz.

Amy Tyler was breastfeeding her 6-month-old son, Harrison, when she discovered a lump.

Tyler’s doctors thought it was just a clogged milk duct. Four months later, Tyler was still suffering.

“I thought I had mastitis. I was in a lot of pain. I was having chest pains,” Tyler said. “I found out the next week I had breast cancer.

“The worst day of my life was finding out I had cancer. The second worst day was losing my breast.”

Tyler had to quit breastfeeding her baby immediately.

“That was probably the most difficult thing,” Tyler said.

Now, she’s undergoing a rigorous round of chemotherapy.

“You basically have to drag me there. My husband — I make him go with me. So he takes a whole day off work because it’s just dreadful,” Tyler said.

She said she’s grown very close to her husband, Kyle, who she said keeps life running smoothly, despite the challenges.

Tyler said she was touched by her friends who established Operation Saving Amy, which gives her hope.

“I’m extremely humbled by my friends who have taken their generosity to help my family,” Tyler said.

Tyler still has months of chemotherapy ahead of her and then radiation treatment.

“Cancer is not cheap. It’s a really hard time right now,” Tyler said. “It’s been a big mountain in a road we’re climbing right now, but I know we’re going to get through it, and it will be over someday.”

Donations for Operation Saving Amy can be sent to:

Operation Saving Amy
c/o Staci Burson
7727 Rosehill Road
Lenexa, KS 66216

Please make checks payable to Amy Tyler.