For older black delegates, today is a dream fulfilled
DENVER – It’s the mid-1940s in middle Tennessee and 19-year-old Inez Crutchfield is sitting on a bus reading as she makes her way home from college in Nashville.
Suddenly, a large white man is looming over the small black woman. “If you don’t get out of that seat, I’m going to throw you off this bus,” he tells her.
Her crime: She was sitting in a seat that a white woman wanted.
Fast-forward to today when 83-year-old Crutchfield will see a black man speak as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president of the United States. “I am so in awe,” Crutchfield said. “It never dawned on me that I would see this day.”
Her words are echoed over and over among the older black delegates at the Democratic National Convention, pioneers who never, ever thought they would live to see this day.
On Wednesday, delegates at the Democratic National Convention formally voted to make Obama their nominee.
Obama’s speech before more than 70,000 at Invesco Field at Mile High today takes on more symbolism because it falls on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963 that culminated a massive civil rights demonstration in Washington, D.C.
Crutchfield, who became one of the first blacks to join the Democratic women’s club in her hometown, said she often felt pressure as a pioneer. She went on to head the group and hold a variety of other titles in Democratic political organizations.
“I was the first at something so I had to be the best,” Crutchfield said. “You have to do it well enough that people will think other people like you can do it.”
Things were so bad her doctor warned that her health was being eroded by the tension. But Crutchfield says her experiences left her with a “wonderful feeling.”
For delegate Josie Johnson, 76, Obama’s nomination takes her back to when she was 16 and helping her father go door-to-door in Houston gathering signatures for a petition to eliminate the poll tax. The fee was one of many devices used in the South to prevent blacks from voting.
In the 1960s she traveled to Mississippi to help in the struggle to provide voting rights and civil rights for blacks.
Johnson also was on the National Mall and heard King’s expression of hope that some day a person would “be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
“Thursday night will represent for me a coming true of this promise,” she said.
For delegate Alvin Brooks, 76, of Kansas City, the first day of the convention nearly brought him to tears as he weighed the significance of the moment.
Brooks, a former mayor pro tem, focused on winning job opportunities for blacks in the 1960s, holding sit-in demonstrations, picketing businesses, marching and driving through neighborhoods blaring protests over loudspeakers.
“My dad and my mom only talked about this day – and I talked about this day to my grandkids,” said Brooks. “This is a day that America has been looking forward to,” he said. “Even if they haven’t, it’s here.”