I wanted to repost this to remind us of the history we are about to make and the millions of Americans who never thought they would see this day.
Original Post:
While we get caught up in the aspects of winning the campaign lets not forget the historical nature of this moment. A moment we live in. Where we can tell our children I was there. Sometimes I imagine how it must have felt to hear Malcolm, Martin, Bobby or John. What it was like to hear FDR's Fireside chats. Imagine living through events like legalized segregation, Brown v. Board of Ed, Loving v Virginia Commonwealth, The Equal Rights Amendment, Title IX, The Civil Rights Act and the March on Washington. Imagine living through the deaths of Malcolm, Martin, Medgar Evers, Bobby K., John K., James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Emmett Till, Viola Fauver, Samuel Younge, Jonathan Daniels, and many others... Imagine what this moment means to people who lived through that time in history. Some who never thought they would ever see the day...
Here are some of their reactions to this moment in history
Serving proudly in the Army in the 1940s, Samuel Green sought to exercise a basic right of citizenship. He wanted to vote.
While stationed overseas, he requested an absentee ballot. But officials in his home town of Montgomery, Ala., said no.
He had not paid the poll tax, the roughly $2 fee that kept many black people from voting.
"Here I was overseas, fighting in World War II, and they denied me the right to vote," said Green, who moved to Detroit in 1945. "We could hardly afford to live, let alone pay a poll tax."
"Today, at 85, Green is proud once again.
I think this was what Dr. King was talking about when he had that March on Washington," Green, a retired Detroit Department of Public Works supervisor, said of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "I never believed in my lifetime I would witness this.
Mary Upshaw McClendon, 84, a Detroit community organizer and retired domestic worker, had her voting precinct delegate review her absentee ballot with her because she wanted to make sure she cast it correctly for Obama.
"I just felt uplifted and everything," said McClendon, who never voted until after moving to Detroit from Red Level, Ala., in 1955 at the age of 32. "It was like a flash of freedom, like when I first voted in the city of Detroit."
"I believe our ancestors prayed for this day to come," said McClendon, whose grandmother had been a slave. "They used to say, 'Things goin' to be all right in the by and by.' Obama done made the by and by come."
The Modesto Bee
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Once or twice a week for the past month or so, Ruth Worthy, 91, has been going door-to-door in her Northeast D.C. neighborhood campaigning for Sen. Barack Obama.
She made the trek in her wheelchair or resting on the arm of her nurse.
"Dear, are you registered?" she would ask.
Worthy belongs to a generation of African Americans who have journeyed from some of the rawest and brutal eras of racism to the present, when they find themselves relishing the idea of a black man possibly becoming president.
When she finished her undergraduate degree at Bridgewater College in Massachusetts, Worthy took a train to Marion, Ala., in the late 1930s to teach U.S. history for $80 a month at the Lincoln Normal School, in one of the Congregational schools for Negro children in the South. That first year, she taught those fortunate enough to attend school, including a quiet eighth-grader and B-average student, the future Coretta Scott King.
Like other black people in Alabama, Worthy was supposed to ride in the back of the bus. Because of her fair complexion, white passengers didn't seem to notice when she took a seat next to them in the front of the bus. Some of the other black passengers did notice, she recalled, and would only smile, offer her a wink or, later, earnestly whisper to her to be careful.
"Yes, dear, I guess I was a little defiant," she said with a chuckle.
Washington Post
I am only 30. I know all kinds of people. My world has been full of diversity. I have been blessed to have grown up in an age where all forms of discrimination are frowned upon. I know I could not have lived through any other time or I would of gotten hurt because I have no tolerance for discrimination of any kind.
I remember times when I used to talk to my Nanna (my grandmother) who died 15 years ago. She was a Depression baby who didn’t trust banks and literally put her money in her mattress. We discovered she saved thousands of dollars when we cleaned up her room after the day she died. I remember when I would ask my Nanna about how it felt to have lived through those times. I would tease her like a smart ass child does about traveling around by horse and buggies too.
I remember when my Nanna told me things were so bad in North Carolina that her family had to leave for New York. They feared her brother would have been killed for being a black man. She used to tell me that her mother was so fair skinned that she could pass for white and white men would ask her why she, a white woman was with that black child. Those times were not safe for her and those white men did not ask her nicely either.
I remember the day Oprah went national. My Nanna cried and was a fan until the day she died. I remember the day when my mother took me, my sisters and brothers in the voting booth to vote for Jessie Jackson. Those moments while important would have never happened unless my grandmothers’ generation and our ancestors had not gone though what they went through. I cannot imagine the things they saw. The strength, courage, and the dignity they shown while living through times that tested our nation and its promise of equality. I thank them and again I ask you to imagine and appreciate this moment. I miss my Nanna and wish she was here to see this. To see a man named Barack Obama, a man that had the skin color she had, on the verge of becoming the 44th President of the United States. It would have been amazing for her. I imagine that she would be crying like I am crying now. I think she is in heaven with Frederick, Harriet, Benjamin Rush, William L. Garrison and others smiling. I can tell my grand kids that I took my kids to vote for Barack Obama too. In fact, I let my boys press the button with me and vote for him. They stood in line with me for two hours here in Memphis, TN. (I bribed them with a promise of McDonalds which I hate) They were as patient as five and a seven year olds boys can be. I ask you do what my Nanna did. Tell your kids,I was there.
Now go out there and make history.. Many blessings..
List of Civil Rights workers who died for freedoms cause.
Southern Poverty Law Center 40 lives
H/T Greg in TN
Mavis Staples "Eyes on the Prize"
H/T Rina
Abraham, Martin, John