Bob Herbert: Champagne and Tears

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/opinion/30herbert.html

It was as though the Champagne had been on ice for half a century or more. On Thursday night, with Barack Obama formally accepting the Democratic presidential nomination at Mile High Stadium in Denver, African-Americans from coast to coast and beyond felt they might now dare to pop the corks.

As I talked to black residents in and around Detroit, a troubled city that has never fully recovered from the riots of 1967, the personal stories — some of them pent-up for decades — came in an emotional rush, often accompanied by tears.

The message I heard again and again was that the triumph of Senator Obama in securing the nomination helped to redeem some of the disappointment and grief of many years of racial humiliation and oppression.

“I was in Clarksville, Miss., when Emmett Till passed away,” said Willie Banks, a sales representative who watched Senator Obama’s speech at Bert’s Warehouse Theatre, a cavernous restaurant and bar that had to set up tables and a portable video screen in the street to accommodate the overflow crowd.