5 November 2008
Obama win caps struggles of generations
Posted by socialdecline under: Uncategorized .
(CNN) — At a modest stucco home in Montgomery, Alabama, an unlikely presidential victory celebration is taking place this morning.
Barack Obama’s election victory represents a triumph for civil rights activists before him.
Peggy Wallace Kennedy, the daughter of the late George Wallace, the Alabama governor who once vowed to maintain segregation forever, is rejoicing.
Kennedy, 58, voted for Sen. Barack Obama. She says she was "mesmerized" when she first heard him speak at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Her admiration for Obama deepened when she learned he opposed the Iraq war. She even slapped an Obama bumper sticker on her car, even though someone told her that the prospect of an African-American president would have her father "rolling over in his grave."
"I think Obama is going to be one of the best presidents we’ll have," she says. "He’s going to bring the freshness we need. We’ve just been bogged down so long. We need this shot in the arm."
President-elect Obama’s victory Tuesday may be a racially transformative event. But for people like Kennedy, who came through the fires of the civil rights movement, it also represents something else — personal triumph. Obama’s win validates the risks they took years ago.
Some, like Kennedy and an entire generation of white Southerners, risked social rejection for renouncing the bigotry of their parents. Others risked their lives while leading civil rights campaigns in the Deep South. Some almost lost their belief in the inherent goodness of America because they saw so many innocent people die.
They are people like Bob Moses, who led African-American voter registration drives in Mississippi during the early 1960s. He was a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi when three civil rights workers were murdered by a group of men that included a Mississippi deputy sheriff. He also helped lead an ill-fated attempt to sit African-American delegates from Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, which was segregated.
Moses grew so disenchanted by his experiences that he moved to Tanzania. He returned to the United States in 1976 and founded the Algebra Project, a national program that encourages African-American students to attend college by first teaching them mathematical literacy.
"We seem to be evolving…, " Moses says. "The country is trying to reach for the best part of itself."
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Moses is evolving as well. Obama is the first president he’s voted for in three decades, he says.
"I don’t do politics, but I made sure to vote this time," says Moses, now 73 years old. "Obama is the first person I really felt moved to vote for."
Moses says he is amazed that Obama has helped lead the country through a racially transformative moment without anyone getting killed.
Pivotal events in America’s racial history — the debate over slavery, the assault on segregation — sparked widespread violence, Moses says.
"I don’t think people appreciate how delicate it is to move the society around these questions without descent into chaos or into pockets of chaos," he says.
Obama’s victory also offered a rare publi
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