Sunday, November 09, 2008 | News, In this Issue..., Politics
The Obama effect

Our first black president represents what might have been if slavery never existed in America

Jeannette Wilson, left, and Elizabeth W. Brown at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center.
Stephanie Ramage

“I just felt so proud to be an American.”—Elizabeth W. Brown

“With an Obama administration, disenfranchised whites will need a voice or they will go to white supremacist groups.”—Ellias Fullmore

By Stephanie Ramage

The morning after America elected the nation’s first black president, a steady stream of visitors laid flowers at the tomb of civil rights martyr Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King.

Sunshine bounced off the water that surrounds the tomb, glittered on the camera lenses aimed at it and glinted along the metal spokes of a wheelchair where a black man of about 60 slumped in silence.

When I asked him what had drawn him to the place, he said it was Barack Obama’s election, and then he began his story, without preamble, in the straightforward style of a police report.

“Back in the 1960s, I was one of the first black males to go to an all-white high school down in Jeff Davis County,” he said softly. “I was kicked by three white males for integrating the school.”

Twenty years later, he had become an officer for the Atlanta Police Department. While transporting some juveniles, two bullets ripped into his back and put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. The 15-year-old who pulled the trigger was a black male. 

The kid was uneducated.

“He was on drugs, with no faith and no love,” Williams said. “There was no one to nurture him. I have forgiven him. This is a day for forgiveness, when you can sort of let it go.”

Around the man’s neck hung a badge that identified him as Richard E. Williams, a police detective for the Atlanta Public Schools. He still works. He took a break to come over to the tomb.

“This election has given us some relief from being made to feel like outcasts,” he explained. “It has shown the world that all we needed was an opportunity for an education. This historic moment has shown what education can do for you. When you look at Obama, you can see that. So I had to come here and thank Martin and Coretta for sacrificing their lives for us so that we could see this day.”

Williams’ brother, who still lives in the south Georgia county that bears the name of the president of the Confederacy, called him at 5 a.m. to tell him that now he believes it really is possible for a black man to be president of the United States.

Tears pooled in deep creases beneath Williams’ eyes as he recounted the conversation. Taking a breath like someone coming up for air, he said, “In the end, there is joy.”

White lies for black children

A little farther along the broad lip of the fountain where the tomb stands, two women sat talking with a handmade poster resting against their knees. The words “Barack Obama, 44th President, A Dream Becomes Reality” were scrawled around a photo of the president-elect.

“I didn’t even have words to say,” said Elizabeth W. Brown, recalling the election results. “It was breathtaking. I just felt so proud to be an American.”

Brown was born and raised in Birmingham, Ala. One Sunday morning in September 1963, a friend named Carole Robertson invited her to services at the 16th Street Baptist Church.

“I had a cold, so I didn’t go,” Brown said. “Otherwise, I would have been there.”

Later that morning, a bomb set by Ku Klux Klansmen detonated, blowing up part of the church and killing four girls, one of whom was Brown’s friend, Carole Robertson.

Brown went on to attend Spelman College here in Atlanta, and it was while a student there in 1968 that she got the news that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated.

“That was 40 years ago,” she said. “I keep thinking of the biblical significance of that, of how the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years and here we are, today. There is still a lot to do, but I hope that this becomes a turning point in the lives of our people, in the lives of Americans. I hope that things will be better for all of us.”

Sitting next to Brown was Atlanta native Jeannette Wilson, who made the poster. The two had only just met. They both felt drawn to the tomb and, once there, found others, like themselves, who wanted to pay their respects to a moment in history that felt almost like a dream.

Wilson said she feels no bitterness toward Obama’s Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, or his supporters. (I didn’t tell her, as anyone who has read my columns knows, that I am one of them.) She and Brown agreed that they were not raised to hate or resent.

In fact, Wilson explained, her parents were so desperate to protect her from knowing how they were viewed by white people that they lied to her. They told her that segregated water fountains were out of order or had some other problem so that she wouldn’t try to drink from them.

 “It was the same if we needed to use the bathroom,” she said. “My mother would come up with some story, because she didn’t want us to know that there were rules against people our color using certain water fountains or restrooms.”

This elaborate ruse was carried out until Wilson was old enough to see for herself that the world was not a place of tainted water fountains and faulty restrooms, but was instead a place of tainted hearts and faulty thinking.

Black America without a history of slavery

Standing close by, a young black man with braids pulled back from his face listened to their stories.

His name is Ellias Fullmore. He’s 30 years old, a graduate of Morehouse College. His mother is Ethiopian and his father, now an executive, was a Black Panther. Because of his parents, he is well aware of the difference in how Africans and African-Americans are viewed and, as Elizabeth Brown pointed out earlier, Obama “is a real African American.”

That is to say, Obama is not descended from slaves. In that way, our 44th president differs from everyone I interviewed for this story, and the vast majority of blacks in America.

“People tend to be more comfortable with Africans than with African-Americans,” Fullmore said. Why are the two groups so different? For the same reason that African-Americans are different from any other group: They suffered something that no one else on earth has—centuries-long, government-sponsored, brutally enforced slavery in the modern era which, though outlawed, cast a long shadow well into the 20th century.

In Fullmore’s opinion, expecting blacks to feel as though they’ve achieved equality just because there’s a black man in the White House is like expecting someone crippled in a car crash to walk out of the hospital and immediately go back to life as usual.

“The bones are still broken,” he said. “You have to remember that African-Americans have been here just as long, and in many cases longer, than most other Americans. Other groups came here with little or nothing, but that’s different from having no choice about coming here. If you choose to get to a place, you’re willing to do what it takes to make it once you’re there. But if you’re there against your will, how will you perform?”

     What other group, he asked, had to endure having the strongest among them taken and beaten, tarred and feathered, and tied to horses and pulled apart as an example to the others?

“When the other African men saw that, they cried like little girls,” he said. “What other group endured children being taken from their mothers? Fathers being torn from their families? Even our last names are cattle brands—they don’t tell you who we are, they tell you who we belonged to.”

Obama’s name belongs to Obama. Although he is not descended from slaves, he grew up black in America, so he has lived the more recent African-American experience. Yet Obama also represents what might have been if slavery never existed in America. He is the embodiment of black America without the horror of its enslaved past. So where does that leave African-Americans and the burden of their history?

“I grew up after segregation and now, I think that we are at the place where we can realize that the point was never people, it was ideas, and now, the point is these kids,” Fullmore said, gesturing to a few youngsters nearby. “A whole generation of black kids needs to grow up without questioning their possibilities.” 

Fullmore said he was struck by that idea while volunteering for the Obama campaign in Virginia. After a campaign event, some of the volunteers got together for a wine and cheese party.

“There we were, 80-year-old white people, young black people, Asians, all of us together having wine and cheese, and I thought, ‘this is the way it should be,’” he said.
 
The problem has been, to no small extent, a set of well-worn myths, he said, and then rifled through a few of them. For example, blacks make up only about 12 percent of the American population, yet are routinely blamed for sapping the resources of entitlement and welfare programs.

“If every single one of us were on welfare, we still would not make up the majority of welfare recipients,” Fullmore said. “The same is true with the prison population. A lot has been made of how many blacks are in prison, but since we’re only 12 percent of the population, then obviously most people in prison are not black.”

In a country that is 75 percent white, the black presence has been overblown, sometimes to the detriment of blacks. To illustrate this, Fullmore pointed out that he doesn’t support affirmative action programs because they actually benefit white women more than blacks.

“Look, how many blacks do you think they have in Idaho?” he asked. “When they need an affirmative action hire in most parts of the country, they’re not hiring blacks.”

There were too few blacks to get a black president elected. Obama was elected because of white votes.

Obama’s presidency, said Fullmore, will mean changes that no one talked about during the campaign—like reaching out to a group of people who have a harder time of it than blacks.

“Dirt-poor white trash,” he said. “If you’re a poor white person, you don’t even exist. Poor white people are invisible even to whites. If you’re a poor black person, you can use that black kinship to get some help from other blacks. Whites don’t have that. With an Obama administration, disenfranchised whites will need a voice, or they will go to white supremacist groups.” SP