Richmond, Virginia: Change is Coming

Clara Silverstein is currently a graduate student in History at UMass-Boston, and is also a journalist and author. While this posting is not about travelling to a battleground state, it is a posting from a battleground state, and is surely about breaking through the barriers of segregation and overcoming racism. Thanks, Clara, for sharing your experience with us. For more on Clara Silverstein, please see her website at http://www.clarasilverstein.com.

Change is Coming

By Clara Silverstein

As my cousin and I walked down the street in Richmond, Virginia, consulting a list of addresses on a clipboard, a door flew open and a woman’s voice called out through the screen

“Y’all live around here?”

I was climbing the stairs to the house across the street, preparing to knock on the door.

"No, we’re out for Obama," I answered.

That name was like a magic word. She opened the screen, smiled and told us she had just voted, and was on the phone with her daughter, telling her to get out and vote.

“Fantastic. Thank you!” my cousin, Judy, said.

I had grown up only two miles away, but I had never walked through this neighborhood before. The woman who questioned us is African-American. I am white. In Richmond in the 1970s, I never had any reason to visit an area where African-Americans lived. Those who crossed the invisible racial lines that marked our streets usually went in the other direction, such as the black women who came to clean for my grandmother.

On this day, Election Day, Judy and I zigzagged across these boundaries, knocking on doors of people who had identified themselves as Obama supporters, reminding them to vote, and offering them a ride to the polls. We hung signs on the doorknobs of anyone who wasn’t home.

The night before, at the Obama headquarters, there were so many cars parked outside that we had to drive around the block to find a spot. Inside, we climbed over people who were assembling lawn signs. A tall, black man in wire-rimmed glasses and dark jeans fit together the metal supports, then handed them to a crew of middle-aged black women who looked like they had come straight from work, and a 30-something white couple with their two elementary-school aged children. In the next room, a woman in khaki pants and blonde ponytail was directing the phone bank, handing out lists of Obama supporters to call and remind to vote. College students sat on pillows in the corner, squinting into their laptops as they looked up directions to polling places.

Judy, her 12-year-old daughter, and I signed up to canvass a neighborhood about six miles away. A 20-something black couple – the man in baggy sweat pants and sweatshirt, the woman with hair in dozens of braids – a gray-haired, white man on a motorcycle, and a white woman about our age, joined us. When we came back, the Obama headquarters was even more crowded. People in the kitchen filled their plates with donated salads, sandwiches, cookies, and sipped bottles of water. The voices of people on the phones, and of those directing volunteers, merged into an excited hum.

The Richmond I left when I graduated from the Open High School in 1978 was just stumbling its way past the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. I remember going to the Woolworth’s store downtown, wondering why its lunch counter was permanently closed. The white clerks who worked the cash registers put change into the hands of white customers, but they gave black customers their change on the counter so they wouldn’t have to touch a black person’s hand. The only reason the elementary school I attended hired its first black teacher in 1970 was because of school desegregation. She presided calmly over my 5th grade classroom, but at the end of the year sobbed when a white parent handed her a thank you gift to recognize her hard work. The city’s first black mayor was elected in 1977, paving the way for Richmonder L. Douglas Wilder to be elected the nation’s first black governor in 1990.

“Change is coming,” Obama repeated endlessly during his campaign. I thought of this as I drove down Monument Avenue, where Obama signs lined the median in between statues of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and General Robert E. Lee. From what I saw as I worked on the campaign in Virginia, it’s already here.


Clara Silverstein is the author of the memoir “White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation” and a freelance writer in Boston.

Post-Election: Emotions, Hopes, Concerns, Ideas for Future

The following notes were written by Prof. Marilyn Frankenstein, a colleague at the College of Public and Community Service (CPCS), UMass-Boston. She wrote them on Nov. 9, 2008, shortly after the election, for a talk she was invited to give to a class at CPCS, and has generously agreed to have them posted on the Obama Travellers blog site. DR


EMOTIONS

A few weeks before when it hit me that we might really have a Black President—up until then whenever I thought of his race, it was always with the concern that racism could cost us the election—and I started to cry remembering so many times as a child singing “We shall Overcome.”

Then when I came out of the voting booth and started to cry again remembering meeting with old Black South Africans in a small house in Soweto as they were preparing to vote for the first time ever and how much it had meant to them. For the first time, voting meant so much to me and I was proud to be able to cast my ballot for a liberal Black man in our country.

And very proud that in Cambridge where I live almost 90% of the votes were for Obama.

“Americans have finally gotten beyond our racial past and picked a black man to clean up our mess.” (“Real Time with Bill Maher” HBO, Friday, November 7, 2008)


HOPE

Walking around New Hampshire, especially in a working class neighborhood, I felt the tidal wave of change:

That there will be no going back in terms of the demographics and in terms of young white attitudes towards race;

That we could elect a Black President while the country is still majority white country;

That the smears largely stuck to McCain and Palin;

That the “Muslim” and “socialist” smears—now that they did not work so well—give us a chance to enter into a national discussion about why those were considered smears;

That we elected a man whose most frequent blog words were “change” and “country” and “future” and “supporters” over one whose most frequent blog words were “opposes” and “drilling” and “pentagon” and “canceled” and biggest of all “Obama” his opponent!

That we could elect a “socialist” president (that as Michael Moore said so many times to the Democratic Party—people will not vote for Bush-lite when they can get the real thing—and this time the Democrats presented reasonably strong liberal positions and got elected which signals a victory in the struggle against privatization;

That a community organizer organized the whole country, in an empowering way, to elect him;

That we could elect an “elite intellectual” signals a victory in the struggle against anti-intellectualism.


CONCERNS

That those young white attitudes towards race are personal and not institutional;

That the Senate races in Alaska and Georgia are being stolen by the Republicans;

That such a small percent of eligible voters voted. For example, 49% of all eligible voters in Boston voted; 62% in the entire country;

That the first “socialist” President is even thinking of appointing Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary. December 1991 memo from Larry Summers, in his role as the chief economist for the World Bank: “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the L.D.C.’s [Less Developed Countries]? . . . A given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost. . . . I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” And for more watch http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/7/can_grassroots_movement_that_propelled_obama;

That Keith Olbermann, my therapist during this election season, will not have any more material unless Sarah Palin goes to the Senate. Someone, I think on Bill Maher, said that 80% of the Republicans want her to be their Party’s leader and 100% of Democrats want that, too.


IDEAS FOR THE FUTURE


At the Democratic National Convention this August, Dennis Kucinich’s chorus in his talk was “Wake up America.” We woke up. Now we have to get out of bed. We need to transfer Obama’s electoral ground organization to a civil movement for progressive change;

My idea for us here at CPCS and UMB and UMass throughout the state is to reconceive our role to include more than education of our students, but also education of all the citizens of Massachusetts. I will soon work with others to write a proposal for a popular education for citizens and will suggest the first topic be an examination of the ethical, economic, political, social and other meanings of the institution of taxes.

For Example...

For example, here is an e-mail that I wrote to my wife on a weekend in late October, when she was away attending a workshop and I went up alone to New Hampshire to do some canvassing:  

Dear Elly, 

Of all the canvassing gin joints in all the world, when I randomly picked up my clipboard assignment in Nashua yesterday, milling around among hundreds of eager canvassers, it was EXACTLY the same streets we had canvassed together two weeks ago.  I went out alone, completed the entire route (!), had better luck finding people home, had about 10 serious conversations, and, I believe, actually swayed a few voters Obama's way.  

On returning to Nashua HQ to do tallying and follow-up phoning to "Not Home" people, we had a surprise visit from Ethel Kennedy.  It was just about dusk, and there were maybe 45-50 people doing finish up work in the HQ when someone called out, "Ethel Kennedy will be here in about 3 minutes."  And, sure enough, she came through the door with a small entourage, and we all stood to give her a standing ovation.  Then she walked around to shake hands with every single person who was there, offering words of encouragement along the way.  

When she came to me, I thanked her and said that I had been the first professor her son Joe had had at UMass-Boston's College of Public and Community Service (this is true!).  She beamed when I mentioned this, and I noticed that two young members of her entourage became quite animated when I mentioned Joe Kennedy and UMass-Boston.  One asked me how Joe had done as a student, and the other asked point blank if Joe had "passed."  Turns out they are the twin sons of Joe Kennedy and his first wife, and here they were escorting their grandmother Ethel on this campaign swing through Southern New Hampshire in support of Obama and Biden.  

You never saw such twins: one with bright red hair and piercing Kennedy-blue eyes, the other with dark hair and dark eyes.  Both very handsome, maybe even a little dashing.  Both well-spoken.  Each, in different ways, resembling RFK.  Both, of course, now of college age or beyond.  It looked to me like they are in the lineage, and I wouldn't be surprised to see one or both entering public life soon.  

Ethel's visit reminded me in an anguished sort of way that Teddy Kennedy had bravely endorsed Barack Obama early on in the primary battles, and how it shocked the Democratic establishment, esp. the Clinton people.  Then, just as Ethel Kennedy was leaving, one of the volunteers called out, "We're all grateful to Bobby and Jack.  They inspire us still!"  And, beyond the pain of those unspeakable losses, beyond the desolation that still lingers about her, she managed yet one more gracious smile, then stepped out into the night.  

It was a long day, working on the streets from about 12 to 4, then another couple of hours back at HQ.  But it was really energizing, even inspiring.  So many young people working so hard. Such seriousness.  Such a recognition that everything depends on keeping up the hard canvassing and voter ID work, and then mounting a full-court press on election day.  Seeing a bunch of college kids spread out on the HQ floor last night, assembling packets for the following day's canvassing effort, working together so seamlessly, with such a concentrated common spirit, I tell you, it made my heart sing.  

Love, D.