Standing room only for Obama

By Darrell Laurant

Published: August 20, 2008

I wonder if the people who wore those “I Stand for Change” T-shirts to Barack Obama’s appearance at E.C. Glass High School realized how literal that slogan would become.

“We’ve been standing a lot,” laughed a woman behind me in line Wednesday afternoon. “We stood in line for tickets, and we’re standing in line now.”

And what a line. By the time the front doors to the high school opened and the multitude admitted 20 at a time, it stretched all the way to the intersection of Memorial and Oakley avenues.

Almost as impressive as the physical length of this adulation (or, at least, curiosity) for Obama, however, was the ethnic makeup. At E.C. Glass on Wednesday, the phrase “minority” was turned on its head.

It would be simplistic (and maybe even racist) to imply that everyone in America with darker-than-Caucasian skin thinks Barack Obama is a god. Even as I speak, there are black Republicans working very hard for John McCain. There are plenty of people of color who are suspicious of Obama, glib as he is.

But Elizabeth Mosely isn’t one of them.

“I rushed over after work to get a ticket,” she said, “and they were all gone. I said, ‘Isn’t there an extra one around somewhere?’ and there wasn’t. Then, the next morning, one of my co-workers said her daughter couldn’t make it and offered me a ticket.

“All I could think of was, ‘God is good.”

On Wednesday night, the atmosphere inside the E.C. Glass gymnasium was electric — part rock concert, part sports event, part “call and response” church service. When Obama and Sen. Jim Webb mounted the small stage, the crowd stood and cheered. When Obama thanked them for the reception, they got back up and cheered again.

True, the so-called “black vote” will not elect Barack Obama by itself, any more than the people who don’t want a black (or mixed-race) president will single-handedly elect John McCain. Moreover, there were plenty of “majorities” at Obama’s Lynchburg gig, evoking memories of Rev. Jesse Jackson’s cherished Rainbow Coalition.

The thing is, Jesse Jackson never inspired this kind of love. Not in Lynchburg, anyway.

This was the same venue that the Rev. Martin Luther King chose to give a speech in 1962. Walter Fore was there, and our reporter Alicia Petska asked him to compare the two experiences.

“I think it’s more important to me today,” Fore said, “because I’m older now and I’ve experienced so much, 50 years of change. To see what we dreamed about then come to reality, well, it’s really just a dream come true.”

Try to wrap your mind around this for a minute. Once upon a time, a large number of Africans were brought to America as slaves. Eventually, their captivity ended, but they then endured 100 years of being treated as lesser beings. Less than 50 years ago, the civil rights movement began to make inroads. And now, here is a man one generation removed from Africa trying to lay claim to the presidency of the United States.

“This election isn’t about Barack Obama,” Obama said Wednesday night. “It’s about you.”

He meant the universal, political “you,” trying to wrap the entire audience up in his message. But I’ll bet that a lot of African-Americans sitting in the bleachers felt that this African-American (in literal terms) was speaking straight to them.

What did this evening mean to John Hughes, a long-time activist in the black community who watched from a wheelchair?

“Everything,” he said.