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.