Obama's victory hailed as shining historic moment

By Arline A. Fleming/Special to the Independent

Bernard LaFayette Jr. came close to being killed by two white men when he attempted to organize black voters in Alabama four decades ago. He spent time in a Mississippi jail. He was a Freedom Rider. He co-founded in 1960 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He is an ordained minister.

“I didn’t think I’d live to see this happen,” he said Tuesday, reacting to news that Barack Obama had been elected the nation’s first African-American president.

LaFayette spoke by telephone from Bethlehem, where he is overseas delivering his message of a non-violent road to peace. A civil rights worker in the 1960s and the director of the University of Rhode Island’s Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies, he watched the election returns from that side of the world.

“This is a really historical moment. But if Obama were white, I’d feel the same way. It’s his character that makes the difference.

“He represents the personal character we tried to emphasize during the days of Martin Luther King.

“He could be any American. He could be Hispanic. He could be a white woman. It’s his character, the way he has responded to attacks and insults is the way Martin Luther King responded.”

LaFayette said he would be talking with Palestinians this week about philosophies of non-violence. He’s with a tour, he said, and on Election Day in the United States, he was in Bethlehem, where according to the Bible, angels told shepherds not to be afraid, they brought good news of great joy for all the people, and they spoke of peace on earth.

LaFayette, a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at URI, stepped back from watching the returns to talk, but before leaving the telephone said:

“Here’s what I predict. If Obama wins, McCain will be one of Obama’s advisers. Yes. Because Barack believes in bringing together the best minds. He believes in making your opponents your allies.

“He believes in bringing out the best in a person.”

Former South Kingstown Town Councilman Harold F. “Cap” Smith, the second black to sit on the council, spent Election Day in the hospital, as did his wife, Sareba. But on the day after the election, home and feeling well enough to talk, Smith said he was excited and sees Obama’s victory “as a good first step. To say that King’s dream has been reached,” he said, pausing, “Well, we’re on our way.”

But Smith went on to say, “Just because we have a black president, what are we going to do about what’s going on at the state and local level? Since I left local politics, there hasn’t been a person of color on any committees or boards. We’re still living quite separately.”

A retired URI affirmative action officer, Smith, 77, served on the Town Council from 1982 to 1992 and also served as its president. He was able to vote Tuesday despite his illness, but his wife was not.

Speaking from her hospital bed, Sareba Smith said yesterday, “This is the most wonderful historic moment.”

She spent the night before watching the election results from her hospital room, taking telephone calls from her family, “rejoicing, crying, shouting. My son said there are no excuses now for black Americans not to step up to the plate.”

Mrs. Smith was so disappointed that she was in the hospital and unable to vote that she called hospital President Louis Giancola into her room and said something has to be done about the situation.

“He said, ‘You’re right, but we’ll have to take you in the ambulance and I said that would be fine, but what about the other people?’ “

She laughed in recalling the Election Night moment, and went on to say electing a black president “will bridge the gap. It’s time to get rid of the bitterness. This is our time.”

URI communications professor Vanessa Wynder Quainoo, who is also interim director of URI’s African and African American Studies program, said Tuesday just hours before Obama was elected that no matter what the outcome, “I think our nation will be changed for the better.”

She had voted early in the day Tuesday feeling “excited because it is a historical moment,” both in terms of those who went before – her grandparents and parents – and in terms of the future for her children, and their children.

“I told my family when I left to vote at 7:30 a.m. that I was going in honor of my grandfather Alfred, my grandmother Annie Pearl, and my mother Beatrice. They have all passed,” she said, but having lived in Memphis, they were close to “the civil rights fight and struggle. They were part of it.”

Her parents and grandparents, she said, “took their voting rights very seriously,” and as children “we were not allowed to be negative about America. We had to keep fighting.”

Yesterday morning, after staying up late to watch the victory, she said she and her husband, Leonard, felt the moment “was more than history. We have a better chance in addressing oppression and other issues facing people of color and the poor.

“There’s a lot of work to do,” in the nation, she said.

She was preparing to report to campus, where she said “the lights will shine a little brighter in the African American Studies Department today.”

In 1966, young history professor Robert G. Weisbord of South Kingstown had an idea: To teach a Black American History course at URI.

“It was the first at the university, and maybe in Rhode Island,” he said. “There was a lot of interest in the course right from the beginning.”

It was a time of turmoil in the nation, he recalled, with riots and deaths in reaction to civil rights legislation.

“The curriculum reflected what was going on in the world.”

These 40-plus years later, Weisbord, who soon will be 75, is still teaching.

“If you had told me 20 or 25 years ago that an African American would be nominated for president, I would have told you you were crazy. It was inconceivable.

“This represents a great deal of progress,” he said. “I get the feeling it’s monumental.”

But yesterday Weisbord said Obama has been elected during “a very, very difficult stage in history.” And Weisbord warns against unrealistic expectations of the newly elected leader.

“You have to look at this in the perspective of what has happened over the past few hundred years.

“I think it’s wonderful for America and terrific for the world. The past eight years have been an unmitigated disaster. I’m hoping this takes us in a whole new direction.”

Arline Fleming can be reached at aafleming@cox.net.

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