Published: November 26, 2008 10:01 pm      

CECILY PATTERSON | Reflections on this time in history: Nov. 4, 2008

There are no words to fully express the feeling of Nov. 4. It was a moment in the very long, and yet short, history of our country that we will never forget – especially African-Americans.

I can only imagine how vivid, how colorful, how rich a picture might have looked from outer-space – an entire world’s people celebrating, united for, and proud of one man – a black man – Barack Obama.

The images we saw on television were overwhelming – massive crowds of people standing patiently in Chicago’s Grant Park and other venues across the country, waiting to see their champion – strangers hugging strangers, the spontaneous street celebrations in cities throughout the world.

I have been living in Washington, D.C., since 1980. During that time, I have attended every presidential swearing-in ceremony – with the exception of Ronald Reagan’s second swearing-in ceremony when bitter cold forced everything to be moved indoors. The closer we would get to the noon hour, the time the president-elect takes the oath of office, I would think, “I sure will be glad when the day comes to see a proud black family gathered at the dais with the wife holding the Bible for a black man to take the oath.”

My only hope was that I still would be able enough to go to the Capitol to see it.

I never thought it would be this soon – heck, I can still run to Capitol Hill if I had to. It was all so wonderful, so unbelievable, so special.

In the midst of all the jubilation, I found myself reflecting on family members who I wished still were here to witness this day. I thought about how I felt going into the voting booth earlier that evening to vote for five generations of free people.

The morning after the victory, my mother’s oldest brother, William (the family calls him “Sonny”), 82, and patriarch of the family, told me that he bristled when McCain stated in his concession speech that he had been serving his country since he was 17.

‘I served my country’

Uncle Sonny said, “I served my country at 17, too, and not with the pedigree of John McCain.”

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Sonny had begged my grandmother to let him enlist in the Navy. The road he traveled in a segregated armed forces, the indignities he endured, not from the enemy but from fellow enlisted men and officers, was nothing like that of McCain.

McCain went into the service with a high school education, so did my uncle; and yet McCain, empowered by his family’s history of military officers, enjoys the status of “a hero.” My uncle and others like him weren’t so fortunate. Many of them joined the service to show their patriotism and loyalty to a country where they were regarded as second-class citizens, at best, and to receive better pay (even though it was less than their counterparts) and medical benefits for their families, and have access to the G.I. Bill.

At 17, my uncle became the head of the family and has been ever since. He has often said he was tired of seeing his mother working in “other folks’ kitchens” and still having to receive Aid for Dependent Children.

Upon enlisting, he put his entire family – my grandmother, three sisters and brother (their father had died of TB in 1936) on all of his benefits packages so Granny could get off welfare, as he put it.

I remember my mother’s youngest sister – who in the ’70s became the first female president of D.C.’s NAACP – returning to our home in Johnstown after the 1965 March in Selma, Ala., retelling the images she saw when she went there to help the NAACP field office take food, clothing and other goods to families who needed help.

City officials and others were going through all mail, particularly boxes from the North that were addressed to black churches or other organizations, and destroying them or taking the money.

They were turning cars and trucks with supplies around at the state’s border or burning them.

My aunt went down with a group of men from the national office of the NAACP and met the Alabama National Guard and state police at the city limits to be escorted into town. She talked about sitting in the back seat with a state trooper who held his rifle at the ready across his lap the entire time they drove from one church, organization or home to another distributing goods.

Assassination and unrest

The night Martin Luther King was shot and killed – April 4, 1968 – riots broke out throughout the country. We lived in Johnstown, and while no one thought anything would happen there, we knew there always was the possibility.

There had been several police confrontations in the past, one resulting in a teenage boy being shot in the back while sitting on a loading dock having a smoke.

My mother and three other members of the local NAACP felt they should take a proactive stance and asked the mayor to call an emergency meeting with the police chief. My mother’s group was actually trying to keep the police in check so that they wouldn’t incite any incidents. The officials felt police should step up their presence in the city, and police vowed to arrest or shoot anyone they found out-of-step.

The decision within the group from the NAACP was that they, too, would patrol the city to keep down any possible incidents. While they had no police escort, they saw the police everywhere they went and felt that the police were watching them more than they were watching the streets. When daylight broke and Mum finally returned home, she said there were only a few small bands of roving youth in small pockets downtown who broke some store windows. There were no fire-bombings or looting.

Mum and her group knew some of the kids’ families and talked them into going home.

In several instances, the group followed the kids through town to let them know they were being individually monitored and followed them until they were out of the downtown area. They did that every night until King’s funeral.

‘Dressed up’ to vote

Election Day was like a religious holiday in our home. Granny and Great-Grandma would get so dressed up to go to vote – corsets, good dresses, Sunday shoes (not the ones they walked to work in), hats, gloves, Grandma with her cane – and they walked to the polling place together with my mother.

The thing that always struck me about that day was that with all the “moving about” to get ready, there never seemed to be a lot of talking above low tones.

In later years, I think my grandmother shed light on why that might have been: Granny was telling me one day about what it was like for them once they were able to vote; it was the greatest thing to come out of the migration.

And yet, Granny said that even after they moved North, there was a deep-seated fear that when they went to the polls they would be subjected to some indignity that would keep them from casting a vote.

They always were mindful not to make the election officials feel “uncomfortable” or draw unnecessary attention to themselves.

Granny and my great-grandmother never missed the opportunity to exercise their rights to vote. They were registered Republicans, the party of Lincoln. Granny voted only a few weeks before she died, and Grandma voted a few months before she died. Each passed on at 89 years.

On Nov. 4, I took my mother for what will surely be her last time to cast a vote for a president of the United States.

I left work early to meet her at home, got her into the van driven by her home health-care provider, transferred her to the wheelchair and off we went.

She has dementia and didn’t really know what was going on, but she knew it was something special. Electioneers parted the way to let us through the crowd, holding doors open for us. People from the board of elections hugged her.

Some were crying, and she was smiling and throwing kisses.

Mum was able to help me sign her name so she could get her ballot, and she colored in the arrows.

I was hardly able to see to mark my ballot, because I was so misty.

Quiet celebration

We returned home. I prepared Mum’s dinner, helped put her to bed, and then I settled in to await the returns.

I talked on the phone throughout the evening with family and friends about the inevitability of what we were seeing shaping up.

When Obama went past the 270 mark for electoral votes and the commentators declared: “Barack Obama the president-elect, soon to be the 44th president of the United States,” I went in and lay across the bed with my mother and quietly cried.

Mum laid there holding me; she thought I was sick. I couldn’t make her understand what had just happened, so we just lay there holding each other while I cried.

She had often said she hoped she lived long enough to see the first black president. She did.

Today it feels as if it’s all a dream. In a very small way, I can imagine the day our people received word that they were emancipated – that feeling of happiness, wonder, apprehension, fear and nausea – all at the same time.

I saw the celebrations in the streets, at Grant Park in Chicago, the crowds in front of the White House, people throughout the world, and I thought, “I don’t want to be out with a whole lot of people. I don’t want a lot of noise.”

Sometimes the most meaningful celebration is the quiet one that takes place within your own heart and head, and all I wanted at that moment was my mother and me.



Cecily Patterson lived in Johnstown from 1960-69. She attended Joseph Johns Junior High and Bishop McCort High School. Her mother, Marion Holton Whitlow, was born and raised in Johnstown and taught pediatric nursing at Mercy Hospital until 1969. The family attended Cambria AME Zion Church on Haynes Street.