St. Thomas’ Parish at Dupont Circle
Civic life
Obama?
Nov 6th
I blew it. I was so sleepy Wednesday morning that it never occurred to me to go invest in history and plunk down 50 cents for a Washington Post. I’m told I could have found one until about 10 a.m., had I looked hard enough. The problem was that I didn’t think about it until 7 p.m. last night.
I needed to go out to walk for exercise anyway (as my spouse reminded me!), so with audacity I put on my navy HOPE hooded sweatshirt and pants (from the college, not the campaign), and loped on over to Georgia Avenue NW, which angles through my neighborhood.
It’s a sort of liminal zone between two economic, although not racial, worlds — on both sides live mostly “people of color” (predominantly and historically African American), although the colors represented now are salted with caucasians here and there. Economically, however, the divide is more stark.
The neighborhoods on the side of Georgia Ave where I live manifest different levels of hope … and fulfillment. But for everyone, hope is a plausible proposition. When you look at the dc.gov website’s crime statistics, though, the little circles marking crime sites in the past year litter Georgia Avenue itself. Even lots of NE (Northeast) DC is now “on the way up” — but Georgia Ave has blocks and blocks of tiny neighborhood stores notable for their bullet proof plexiglass cages for the cashiers and burglar bar coverings on every inch of explosed glass.
Last night, these were the establishments that called my name. I went out cruising about twenty 
blocks of Georgia Avenue looking for the most elusive commodity in Washington, DC: an “Obama Makes History” edition of the Washington Post!
Which led me to the only establishments that were open (besides a couple of drug stores, a smattering of fast food restaurants, and two tiny, sad liquor stores) — those little markets that usually don’t look all that inviting even when the chain-link is off the windows and the lights are on and the doors are open.
Last night, however, I was a man with a purpose. Four quarters in my sweat pants pocket, I tried the first one I came two. Two Hispanic men looked up as I asked, “any newspapers left?” Then seeing a rack with El Tiempo Latino and La Nacion, I added, “Washington Posts”? At which point both men smiled, saying almost in unison, “Obama?” “Si, Obama” I squeezed out. “No, no, no,” they replied, and then an avalanche of Spanish I didn’t understand. I smiled back, waved goodbye and went on my way.
My whole walk went like that. I’d walk in a store, point at the empty newspaper rack and say “Obama?” and almost before I could get out “Do you have anymore Washington Posts?” either the clerk or other customers would smile and say, “Obama!” followed by sad “No, no, no’s” about the newspaper and then cascades of laughter and banter in several languages I honestly couldn’t identify — maybe Korean in one store, and finally English in at least two or three — but always happy, sometimes boastful, othertimes self-congratulatory, never inhospitable words about the miracle of their new President: “Obama!”
I know it won’t last. Just remember the shift from 9/11 to the anniversary of “Shock and Awe” and it’s clear that this honeymoon won’t last forever. Things will happen that will dim the memory and tarnish the glow a bit and re-insert suspicion into our exchanges with even our neighbors.
For a few days, now, though, I can walk down the sidewalk in 16th Street Heights, or stand at the 14th Street bus stop, or get off the Fairfax Connector in Herndon, VA, and my neighbors, fellow commuters, and even Ziggy, the middle-aged Coptic Orthodox Ethiopian engineer who I often visit with as we walk from the bus to our respective places of employment — all of us, with the utterance of just one word, smile, and are joined together: “Obama!” And there’s a story to tell.
And there’s hope! Hope that change really is on the way. Hope that we’re all up to it. Hope for what we share, not what in many cases still obviously divides us.
No. I never found a Post. But in the spirit of full disclosure, I just read online that the Post is printing 350,000 more commemorative-edition copies that will go on sale in the morning. I’m headed to Georgia Avenue first thing tomorrow morning, this time to the CVS Pharmacy, which is listed as a Post distributor for these treasures. And … this is hard to admit … just in case, I just bought a copy from Cafe Press for $9.95 + postage and shipping. “Obama Makes History.” And I admit I want a piece of it while it lasts.
What I learned on election day
Nov 4th
Voting for the first time in a new neighborhood, I arrived at my polling place this morning at 6:30 a.m. to find a line down one side of the block and halfway up another. Just in front of me was an octogenarian African American matriarch, dressed to the nines, and proudly refusing all offers to move up in line or to sit down in someone’s folding chair.
I took my place in line at the same time as a twenty-something young man, who with the air of entitlement that only youth can fully muster, loudly complained: “How long ago did this line start, anyway?!”
“Honey,” the elder in front of me replied, “…This line began a looooong time ago … way, way, way before even your mama was born!” “Speak it, Sister” somebody further in front of us chimed in, in response to which the sage of Farragut Street added her parting shot to all who would listen: “You need to know that I can remember when we couldn’t even be in line to vote! So don’t you mouth off about the line being sooo looong! All you had to do was show up!”
Baby boomer child of the deep south that I am, I suddenly realized with a bit of existential horror that I, too, remembered when African Americans couldn’t vote in my home state of Mississippi. Beginning in 1890, the state Constitution had required anyone who wished to register to vote to be able to read, write, and provide an interpretation of a section of the state Constitution selected by a local white official. A grandfather clause had effectively exempted illiterate whites, but not blacks, from the literacy test by relating qualifications to whether one’s grandfather had voted before a certain date. Furthermore, poll taxes, based on the number of heads in a voting registrants’ family, made it financially impossible for most blacks, many of whom had large families, to qualify to vote anyway.
It wasn’t until the 24th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1964 that these poll taxes were finally outlawed in federal elections. And when the next year the federal Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, still less than 7% of blacks in Mississippi were registered to vote.
A great many of these owed their voter registration to the tireless and fearless work of Fannie Lou Hamer, who in 1962 was a 45 year old former sharecropper from Ruleville, MS. After learning for the first time that year that blacks had a constitutional right to vote, on August 31st she was part of a group of 18 blacks who traveled by bus to Indianola, my home town, to register to vote. All failed the still-required literacy test. I know because my mother was working as usual across the hall from the voter registration office that was administered by the white Circuit Clerk of Sunflower County, who was the father of one of my classmates.
Ms. Hamer failed again in December 1962. Then on her third try in January 1963 she passed and was registered to vote. Then she really got to work.
For the next 14 years until her death in Mound Bayou, MS, in March 1977, the year I began my Ph.D. at Emory University, Fannie Lou Hamer was a constant thorn in the flesh to all those whites who stood in the way of black voter registration.
During those years my mother was the Deputy Chancery Clerk in the Sunflower County Courthouse and best friends with her counterpart in the Circuit Clerk’s office across the hall, who knew firsthand what these literacy tests entailed. Although I have no certainty about my own mother’s precise role in the disenfranchisement of black voters, I know that she and my father knew full well what was going on there, and like other whites, at the very least condoned it with the silence of the collaborator.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s favorite Bible passage was Luke 4:18: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.” Ms. Hamer was known not only for her fearlessness and perseverance but also her sharp wit. My favorite was a line she is said to have used often during the Voting Rights campaign: “Whether you have a Ph.D. or No D., we’re in this bag together. And whether you’re from Morehouse, or Nohouse, we’re still in this bag together.”
When my neighbor this morning exclaimed, “This line began a looooong time ago,” my eyes suddenly teared-up in realization of the debt we all owe to Fannie Lou Hamer. I learned again how precious a thing it is that “We’re still in this bag together.” And I was so proud to be there in line, and so humbled that for all my life, all I’ve had to do is to show up.
