Waking Up to America at a Crossroads

November 5, 2008

The Women’s Media Center asked three commentators—scholar Beverly Guy-Sheftall, documentary film producer June Cross, and columnist Courtney E. Martin—to share their reflections on the morning after an election that many hope will change their lives.

All day yesterday and throughout the night, I heard from friends from my childhood in Memphis, Tennessee; from colleagues at Spelman and former students; from sister comrades here and around the world whose struggles to make this a better world are ongoing. I read Alice Walker's election reflections on her newly launched website and reread with tremendous joy her earlier open letter about the significance of Barack Obama's journey to the presidency. I thought about Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells Barnett, Anna Julia Cooper, Lorraine Hansberry, Shirley Chisholm, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson—and wished they were here.  Though I never thought I would see this day, I am simply thrilled and overwhelmed.  More than anything else all day today I will say quietly to myself Martin Luther King's stirring words—FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST!!—Beverly Guy-Sheftall

I had not been an Obama-maniac. For nearly two years I had resisted the hype and refused to subscribe to the text messages. I had deleted most of the emails from my friends who went to Obama camp; had even—I’ll admit it now—supported Hillary in the first months of the Democratic primaries. I’d watched Senator Barack Obama’s political career since 2004, when he prevailed over Jack Ryan, a conservative who had been the presumptive front-runner for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois, and I’d been glad when he vanquished the Ryan’s replacement, Republican Alan Keyes; but I wasn’t sure how I felt about him.  He seemed to be part pragmatist and part political opportunist; a centrist wily enough to take advantage of the political tide turning against the Baby Boomer generation.  As the buzz and the crowds began building around his presidential candidacy, it didn’t seem possible that one man—and a politician at that—could possibly live up to the idealism presented in those countless YouTube videos.

That was all before he gave his race speech in March, before he won his party’s nomination, and before I walked into a voting booth yesterday morning. I stood inside those curtains for a long time, staring at the name Barack Obama at the head of the Democratic Party ticket.  Barack is eight years younger than I, and we share a similar background:  my mother was a white woman with Idaho roots, my father a black entertainer from Philadelphia whom I barely knew. But my mother didn’t have the courage or the familial support that Obama’s mom had. After my parents split, around the time that I was two, my mother had sent me to live with another family in a city two hours away from New York. When I spent time with my mom, she had asked me to call her “Auntie,” so that her friends wouldn’t know she had had a child by a black man. And here I was, more than 50 years later, ready to vote for a black man to be president of the United States. I couldn’t help but smile. I couldn’t help but think ruefully to my own childhood, and to the gulf that separated my life and Obama’s—those eight years between 1954 and 1961, which encompassed the Little Rock 9, the Montgomery bus boycott, and almost the March on Washington. My father had been denied a living by racism, had drunk himself to death because of racism. And after I pulled the lever in the Democratic column, I cried.—June Cross 

The story of the youth vote has generally gone like this: a lot of young people express enthusiasm for a presidential candidate, maybe feign excitement in the streets or online for a short period of time, then prove unaccountable when it comes to Election Day. But this year, something entirely different happened. A generation of young people was swept up in a bonafide grassroots movement that elicited not just adoration for a truly remarkable leader, but a deep commitment to community ethics and citizen action. And what’s more, that generation—often written off as apathetic and self-focused—has now become part of a progressive political machine.

Obama didn’t just win over a few celebrity-obsessed co-eds with texting and Facebook strategies. His campaign created the beginning of many more years, in some cases inspired lifetimes, of community organization, leadership development, and movement building. The Democratic Party will be stronger and more sustainable, the country will be safer and healthier, and the future will be in the hands of complex, reflective thinkers who understand that the world changes one conversation, one step, one bright idea at a time.—Courtney E. Martin