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This Morning

by Khary Lazarre-White | originally posted on Feb 2, 2009

November 4, 2008. This morning, at 5 a.m., in the darkness, my grandmother, Lois Amelia Meadows White, walked up and stood at the front of a locked gated entry to a school in order to be first in line to vote at her local precinct. She waited one hour, in front of wrought iron gates, patiently, almost at ease that finally the day had come, until the doors opened, and then she voted for Barack Obama. She was done by 6:15, but her wait wasn’t for a little more than an hour, it was for nearly 85 years.

It is said that this election has been post-racial. And indeed, in so many ways Barack Obama has run a campaign as a bridge that has shattered preconceived notions of what is possible, politically and racially. in this nation. He has built a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-generational, cross class power base. And yet, in ways that have been too often undervalued – this election is completely, and absolutely intertwined with race. My grandmother’s early morning wait – her unsettled sleep, her tightly clenched hands and expectant eyes – the fierce pride in her bearing, is all about being Black in America. First, she dismissed Barack Obama’s chances with derision based on a learned experience of shattered hopes; then she worried, as if he were her own son, that an assassin’s bullet would find him as history had taught her would be so; then she cut out a picture from a magazine of his and Michelle Obama’s likeness and framed it, and placed it on her mantle, along with all of the framed pictures of her family – her parents, long gone; her children, those alive and those who have passed too soon; her siblings who remain and those who have died; her grandchildren and greats – and the Obamas.

There are so many who believe that the history of this nation, the original sin of slavery and the disease of racism, are somehow ancient – belonging to a time long ago. This history, its legacies and present day realities, have yet to be fully confronted, and due to the repeated avoidance of issues of race, many remain unaware of why this moment is so powerful. A true paradigm shift is represented by Barack Obama’s election, yet many are unaware of the emotional resonance of this history and how recent it is. It is living memory. It is my family. This election of Barack Obama is about so much more than race. And yet, it is centrally and inescapably about race.

Lois Amelia Meadows White was born in 1924 in a tiny, rural, eastern North Carolina town. When she was still in her mother’s womb, just a couple of months from being born, her father, a logger, was struck by lighting and killed. She was the last of her parents’ children. When she was five, her mother died from double pneumonia, having caught it for the second time from washing the clothes of white people by hand, outside on their porches, in the wintertime. This death left 7 children orphaned. Their only direct elders remaining in their lives were their maternal grandmother, a woman who had been enslaved for her own childhood years, and their elderly and frail paternal grandfather, a man who had been enslaved for twenty-three years, and who in his youth had been feared by all for his defiance of Southern norms. He would die himself a few years later. For a time the children were moved around from extended family home to extended family home and then they came back together to raise themselves – with the 14 year old girl taking the lead, this sister becoming mother to all. Their grandfather had been a successful farmer and had amassed a great deal of land for a Black man at that time. But with their parents no longer around, with only children on the land, all the land, save the plot on which the family house stood, was taken by whites in the town. No one was ever sure how it happened – it just disappeared and there was no one to whom to bring a grievance. In their town a sheriff was named, chosen because he had been known to have lynched a Black man. He would keep the Blacks in line. My grandmother and her siblings were known as a tough bunch, able to physically defend themselves when challenged. The sheriff’s son touched my grandmother in an inappropriate way – my great-uncle Alphonso broke his nose. The sheriff only asked my great-uncle about the incident – no more, because only 10 years before, after another racial incident, the sheriff and other armed white men had showed up at the family home, the family had put shot guns out the window, and a shootout had ensued. The men went away that day and the word spread not to meddle with the Meadows people. The siblings raised themselves, food was scarce, educational achievement ended by junior high school. The teenagers worked full time to provide for the younger ones. When they walked down the street of their town and local areas, and whites were walking as well, they were expected to step off the street, into the gutter, to allow the whites to pass, and to never, ever look them in the eye.

My grandmother married at 16 and had four children by 21. One day, when my father was a boy, he became sick. My grandmother took him to the hospital in town early in the morning – wanting to be the first to arrive. She sat in the colored section of the waiting room, and then white mothers arrived with their children. One after another they were seen. My grandmother held my father, her sick child, and waited until the end of the day, as was the custom, until all the white children had been seen - one of the many daily instilled lessons about the limits of one’s ambition, one’s proper place. Her husband, my grandfather, refused to partake in the established forms of employment available for Black men – refused the labor of picking tobacco and serving, seeking to remove himself as much as possible from a world where Black men were only called boy. And so he became a gambler, a card player. He was good. So good he put four children through college with his winnings.

One of her sons, my uncle Simeon Meadows White would, in his teenage years, become the leading organizer of the Civil Rights Movement in Kinston, North Carolina. He always said he was just “enraged at the injustice of it all” and that he “felt the urgent need to act.” As he engaged in his organizing, a popular local radio show host would rail on his show about my uncle’s efforts, spewing filth about a “local communist nigra boy” stirring up trouble. The talk show host would go on to be the five-term United States Senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms. My grandmother would allow the mostly teenaged organizers to meet in her home. While many in her generation were intimidated, she said she was tired of waiting for a change – something needed to be done. The teenagers would protest the laws of segregation at local stores, protest the pool that would not allow my father, the all-state swimmer, to enter, protest the movie theater that relegated the Black patrons to the balcony seats. My grandmother’s brothers, my great-uncles, would refuse to go downtown to the protests, because as they said, “If I see someone dragging one of my nephews or nieces down the street, I’m gonna see red, and I’m gonna shoot somebody.” My grandmother walked the line though, maintaining nonviolence in keeping with the mode of the Movement. But one day, when a teenage boy ran up on the line, and cleared his throat and drew up some phlegm to spit on her as she protested the Jim Crow laws, she stepped back and met his eyes: “Careful sucka, we ain’t all nonviolent.” He walked away.

My father, Douglas Hughes White, protested segregation and exclusionary voting efforts while living in Kingston and later in Raleigh-Durham where he attended the historically Black North Carolina College. He lived in Segregation for 23 years. He was an all-state swimmer and football player, and he never lost a race in his life. He was a brilliant student. He had few college possibilities though. He was 18 and Black in 1961. He graduated from college and went on to be a tenant and community organizer in New York City. At 26, his ability shining through, he gained entry to arguably the most elite graduate school in America – The Yale Law School. He was in the first class that had more than one or two Black students. His classmates in law school included Bill and Hillary Clinton. He was one of the founders of the Black Law Student Association, which would become a national organization. He has carved out a prominent career in the areas of human rights and civil rights law, labor, and politics. Today, he stood in line for an hour and a half and voted for a Black former civil rights professor, a former community organizer, and a long time local politician, for President of The United States of America. This morning, my grandmother and father awoke in the darkness, the long wait over, to vote for a man for President who has been called during this campaign a “Communist,” derided for his “organizing,” dismissed for his work around “civil rights,” and demeaned as a “boy.”

This morning as I rode in a cab to meet my grandmother, the cab passed a polling site. The cab driver and I both stared at the line of people that had already begun to snake down the block. The cab driver, an immigrant from West Africa, his English heavily accented, exclaimed at the vision of so many on line already: “Obama will win today. He will change the world. Not the country. The world. There will be no more violence, no more poverty, everyone will get along. He is going to change the world.” I smiled at his faith. My heart sank at the impossible expectations, the weight of responsibility on Barack Obama’s slender shoulders. This exceptional man has been elevated to a mixture of a religious figure, a savior, an icon – infallible - the one we have been waiting for. Clearly he will not end poverty. Clearly he will not end war. Clearly much will not change. He is faced with two wars, an economic disaster and the vestiges of the most destructive Presidential administration of recent times. We must be realistic regarding what his election means and does not mean. He is not going to bring radical change, or establish true equality with regards to race and class in this country. Those of us who are deep progressives must be aware that he has said from the beginning that he will bring disparate political groups together. Inherently, this means governing from the center and thus many of his policies will disappoint us. Barack Obama is a new voice. He brings a new approach to American politics, he will be deeply reflective, and there is an unmistakable dignity and decency that he possesses. Yet, It is obvious that he cannot end humanity’s inhumanity – it is also obvious he is what he is - a politician. We must hope he is the best of a politician, but not expect more. And even among the transforming figures he has been compared to – we must remember, as he would surely attest, he is not the moral and righteous leader that was Martin Luther King, that his voice does not confront and speak truth to power like Frederick Douglass, that his life does not mirror the sacrifice and stunning political altering of a landscape of a Nelson Mandela.

And yet, we must still celebrate the moment; celebrate the unbelievable change that his election represents. In 1619 the first Africans were brought to this country in chains. Today, this country elects a Black President. The White House was built, literally, by loaned slave labor, with the payment for construction services paid to the slave owners. Now a Black family will live in a house built by enslaved hands. In a country where we still idealize, honor and revere George Washington as founding father, a man who owned over 300 Black people and who ripped out the teeth of those he enslaved to replace his own rotting teeth; in a country where we still idealize, honor and revere Thomas Jefferson, who owned Black people, and committed one of the most barbaric acts imaginable – the enslavement of his own children; in a country that stole the land of my grandmother, that refused to see her and her sick child because of the color of his skin, that elected an unrepentant racist like Jesse Helms, time and time again - in a country such as this, this day represents an altering of the very vision of this country. The foundation of this nation changed today. The history of this nation was altered today. The alignment is new. It is a new morning in America. We do not know what the future days will bring, but it is a new morning.

And so I have had a recurring vision of the future. It is early morning, January 21, 2009, the dawn after President Barack Obama’s inauguration. My grandmother, a woman raised in part by one who had been enslaved, has been invited to spend the night in the White House. It is 5 a.m. and she has, as is her custom, awoken before the sun has risen. And she walks the halls of the White House and enters the room of President Obama’s daughters and looks down at girls the ages she was when she was orphaned, that she was when she was forced to survive virulent Segregation, alone, without any parent. These girls, who could be her great grandchildren, now sleep in the White House. She looks down at their brown skin and neat braids and she is starkly aware of how different their lives will be. And then she walks down the hall to the room where the President sleeps. She cracks open the door and looks at the faces of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. She sees in Michelle, a daughter of working class parents, a Black woman who could have been herself if her own future had not been ordained by racism and poverty. My grandmother only finished junior high school. Michelle has degrees from Princeton and Harvard. She looks at Barack’s face – a man who could be her son. She sees in Barack a vision that she could never have imagined – was too scared to hope for, thought no amount of waiting would ever bring. This woman who knew those who had been slaves, who knew no protection from the law, who knew stolen land, who feared lynch mobs coming for her children as they sought to end Segregation, looks upon the face of the President of the United States and sees her own. Her wait is over. It is morning. She is in.

Khary Lazarre-White is the co-founder and co-executive director of The Brotherhood/Sister Sol.