In Albany, Ga., a majority-black city, black people who once faced jail, beatings and job loss for demanding the right to vote saw a black man elected to their nation's highest office on Tuesday.
ALBANY, Ga. — Rutha Mae Harris backed her silver Town Car out of the driveway early Tuesday morning, pointed it toward her polling place on Mercer Avenue and started to sing.
“I’m going to vote like the spirit say vote,” Miss Harris chanted softly.
I’m going to vote like the spirit say vote,
I’m going to vote like the spirit say vote,
And if the spirit say vote I’m going to vote,
Oh Lord, I’m going to vote when the spirit say vote.
As a 21-year-old student (on right in photo), she had bellowed that same freedom song at mass meetings at Mount Zion Baptist Church back in 1961, the year Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, a universe away. She sang it again while marching on Albany’s City Hall, where she and other black students demanded the right to vote, and in the cramped and filthy cells of the city jail, which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described as the worst he ever inhabited.
For those like Miss Harris who withstood jailings and beatings and threats to their livelihoods, all because they wanted to vote, the short drive to the polls on Tuesday culminated a lifelong journey from a time that is at once unrecognizable and eerily familiar here in southwest Georgia. As they exited the voting booths, some in wheelchairs, others with canes, these foot soldiers of the civil rights movement could not suppress either their jubilation or their astonishment at having voted for an African-American for president of the United States. ...
It was a day most never imagined that they would live to see. From their vantage point amid the cotton fields and pecan groves of Dougherty County, where the movement for voting rights faced some of its most determined resistance, the country simply did not seem ready.
Yes, the world had changed in 47 years. At City Hall, the offices once occupied by the segregationist mayor, Asa D. Kelley Jr., and the police chief, Laurie Pritchett, are now filled by Mayor Willie Adams and Chief James Younger, both of whom are black. But much in this black-majority city of 75,000 also seems the same: neighborhoods remain starkly delineated by race, blacks are still five times more likely than whites to live in poverty and the public schools have so resegregated that 9 of every 10 students are black. ...
Late Tuesday night, when the networks declared Mr. Obama the winner, Miss Harris could not hold back the tears, the emotions of a lifetime released in a flood. She shared a lengthy embrace with friends gathered at the Obama headquarters, and then led the exultant crowd in song.
“Glory, glory, hallelujah,” she sang. After a prayer, she joined the crowd in chanting, “Yes, we did!”
Among the things Miss Harris appreciates about Mr. Obama is that even though he was in diapers while she was in jail, he seems to respect what came before. “He’s of a different time and place, but he knows whose shoulders he’s standing on,” she said. ...
Lucius Holloway Sr., 76, said he lost his job as a post office custodian after he began registering voters in neighboring Terrell County. He said he was shunned by other blacks who hated him for the trouble he incited.
Now Mr. Holloway is a member of the county commission, and when he voted for Mr. Obama last week he said his pride was overwhelming. “Thank you, Jesus, I lived to see the fruit of my labor,” he said.
(h/t to a tweet from Miss Roboto)