“When they announced it, I had just ordered a hamburger and I think I took a bite, but I had to put it down,” grinned Addie Singleton, 80, a retired Lompoc teacher. “I couldn’t eat it. I just sat and cried. It’s the most wonderful thing I’ve seen in ages.”
Clarence Willis of Vandenberg Village is still a barber at 85.
“It was tears, it was joy, it was emotion and even a little hollering. Even my angina wanted to kick in,” he said. “I almost had to take one of my pills. I wish I could have pulled my father up and asked him, ‘Dad, do you believe this?’”
Rev. Henry Lewis, pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Santa Maria, was on his knees: “When it was three electoral votes and eight for McCain, I was praying. We look back 40 years to Martin Luther King, and this day we can see the fruit of our labor. It’s just fabulous.”
These images reflect the euphoria felt on the recent election night by leaders in the African-American community in Lompoc and Santa Maria, many of whom are old enough to remember historic benchmarks along America’s tortured path of race relations: leaving the South for safety, President Truman integrating the armed forces, Rev. King and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and failed presidential campaigns by Jesse Jackson and others.
At this late date in many of their lives, they watched, transfixed by an event they thought they might never see: the election of a black man, Barack Obama, as president of the United States.
Their euphoria—tearful, speechless, jaw-dropping joy—was complemented by amazement at the multi-ethnic coalition that propelled Obama’s victory, and also by hope for what his election promises both from government and within the black community. Fears linger, however, for the president-elect’s safety, as does a whiff of wistful regret for what may be a window closing on uniquely African-American issues.
The Sun queried nine longtime leaders: Singleton Willis Rev. and Mrs. Lewis former Lompoc school trustee Arthur Hicks Dr. Jeri Harshaw, an Air Force retiree with a Ph.D. in human development Lola Day, one of the very first arrivals at the opening of Vandenberg Air Force Base 50 years ago Rev. Dan Tullis, retired pastor of Grace Temple Baptist Church in Lompoc and Lawanda Lyons-Pruitt, president of the Lompoc-Santa Maria Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
“I’m sure my parents couldn’t have believed it,” said Harshaw, whose first degree came from Tuskegee in 1940. “The only people they ever saw who voted were the school principals. We had three black school principals in Cleveland County who could vote. They were college graduates.”
Cleveland County in North Carolina used a complicated history test and a hefty poll tax to discourage aspiring black voters.
Harshaw was born in 1918. Her father was a sharecropper. He had no land of his own. He split the harvest with the landlord.
“If you had your tractors and your horses and your mules, you got two-thirds of it,” said the onetime master sergeant.
Harshaw can remember watching an incident that still sends shivers down her spine: her father facing down a crowd of white men holding a noose.
“A hired hand was plowing a field or something and the man came out and said something to him and the hired man knocked him down. Then they got after every black man, every black kid between 15 and 30. They were out with rope ready to hang him,” Harshaw remembered. “My father said, ‘You’re not coming in my house. My sons don’t work outside our family.’ ‘But that n—– beat up so-and-so and we’re going to kill him.’ They had the ropes to hang him. My brothers were all upstairs hiding. My father said, ‘If you make one step on that porch I’ll shoot you.’ He was standing there with a double barrel shotgun. They didn’t come on the porch.”
With that chilling experience in memory, the scene in Chicago’s Grant Park election night seemed created by Hollywood. It was as memorable as the election itself.
Some 100,000 tear-streaked Obama fans of all colors cheered, shrieked, cried, and celebrated.
“That hasn’t happened before,” said Tullis, 79, who glories in presenting a grumpy demeanor. “It was a first that drew together a mesh of people. They weren’t only just black, they were not just white, there were all colors and kinds there, which gives me hope.”
Harshaw was moved as well: “Wasn’t that something? They were mixing and they were hugging each other, the black ones and the white ones, the Asians and everything else. They were just having a good time. Just like they were all brothers and sisters.”
For many of those interviewed for this story, the pride of getting “one of ours” elected was only one ingredient in the historic evening. They also believe the race issue is changing.
“It’s more than an African-American being elected,” said Lyons-Pruitt, 53. “It’s more than that. It’s also that we’re moving beyond looking at people because of their color. I think it’s a start to living in a color-blind society.”
Television commentators calculated Obama’s popularity among the young and hypothesized that the “millennial” generation may be “post-racial”—or at least considers race less important than their elders do.
Hicks, 85, originally from Atlanta, became famous for his service with the trailblazing Tuskegee Airmen. Later, he became the first African-American elected to public office in Lompoc.
“Post-racial? I can understand that,” he said. “I think that they are becoming that way. I think about my children. The three of them are married interracially and I wonder, how did we do this?” Hicks chuckled and pointed to portraits of his light-skinned grandchildren.
“I used to tease folk that I was a black Archie Bunker,” Tullis rumbled in his basso profundo. “Then one night my son comes in and says, ‘Hi Mom, hi Dad, I want you to meet my fiance e.’ When I turn around, here’s this white girl standing there. I have two grandchildren from that union. One of them is a professor at Florida State University. Don’t tell me the state can’t be changed.”
Obama has promised legislative change on numerous fronts. He has also made a point of appealing for change at the family level. One theme is the call for parents to get tough, to shelve video games and promote scholarship.
“This means the ball is in everyone’s court,” Willis said. “In winning an election, there’s something that goes with it: responsibility. Now all the anger and frustration that has been in the minority people, now they’ve got to find something else to do with it. It’s a true saying now: You can be anything you want to be. That didn’t go for minorities before. For the first time, there’s no place to hide, to blame.”
Hicks was a teacher for years. Reading and learning are dear to his heart.
“We’ve said in years gone by, ‘Why try?’ Obama is the example of why there should be effort to overcome those things that hold us back. As a teacher, I asked, ‘Do you have a newspaper or magazine in your house? If you don’t, do you want one of mine?’ Shut down the TV set.”
Even underperforming schools are no excuse, declared Agatha Shorter-Lewis, a retired probation officer: “I’m not going to put it all on the schools. You have to have some inner thought in yourself to want to achieve. I can have a good teacher or a bad teacher, but if I have it in me, I can surpass the bad teacher.”
Through the wafting euphoria and bracing resolve, however, a few looming reservations are apparent. One is a nagging fear for Obama’s safety. This generation remembers clearly the assassinations of King and John and Robert Kennedy.
“I saw Obama walking with his daughter Halloween night,” Tullis said. “The FBI was nowhere near. That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Lyons-Pruitt noted an ominous development close to home that flies in the face of talk of post-racialism: “The week before at Cal Poly, kids who shouldn’t have any idea about racism and hatred and discrimination were wearing black and hanging out a Confederate flag and a noose. Now what is that about a week before the election?”
And despite the post-election “hope we can believe in,” there remains a residue of skepticism about any politician, whatever his skin tone.
“I’m happy and proud that Obama was elected,” Tullis confided. “But will he make a difference in my life? I talked to some veterans of Iraq last night. One is 100 percent disabled. He talks about getting his brain shot up.”
What can Obama do for that?
Another reservation is rooted in the unique history of most black Americans, if not Obama.
“I was not as elated over it as I probably should have been,” Hicks confessed. “Maybe it’s the matter of time. It should have happened earlier.”
Hicks recounted a story unearthed recently by the Associated Press regarding the lynching of a returning veteran and three others in Monroe, Ga., in 1946. An FBI file was uncovered after 60 years, which suggested that a governmental leader at the time may have played a role in the murders. No arrests were ever made.
“My sister was brought up near Monroe,” Hicks said. “After having read this, I asked her. She said, ‘Sure, our parents told us all about it.’”
But Obama portrayed himself as a candidate for all, a Democrat who just happened to be black. Will the post-racial Obama administration seek justice for these long-ago murders? Or will more inclusionary and more immediate needs like the economy crowd out righting the old wrongs?
“I think he has to be inclusive,” Lyons-Pruitt responded. “I don’t think he can be exclusive and just look at one group of people. People talk about having been promised 40 acres and a mule [at emancipation]. That’s not going to happen. This is a new day, and we have to move forward and not look backwards. I wonder what purpose it serves to go back and pour salt on a wound that has started to heal.”
On balance, Hicks is far from displeased: “Certainly I’m happy. I think we’ve come a long way. What has held us back, I believe, is the concentration on the black and white of things rather than acting as Obama has expressed. We’re not a black nation or a white nation or an Asian nation or a Mexican nation.
“We’re a nation.”
And, as Lyons-Pruitt said of her election night tears of joy, “I have a lot of friends who are not African-American. And they cried with me.”
Contact freelancer John McReynolds through the executive editor at rmiller@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 20-27, 2008.