Champagne and Tears
By BOB HERBERT
Published: August 30, 2008
Detroit
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.
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Jennifer West, a 47-year-old insurance executive told me: “We’re all sitting on feelings we don’t usually talk about. We’re starved for a collective sense of affirmation. Barack is the son, the brother, the uncle, the cousin who made good. Who overcame. God bless him for what he means to us.”
The suddenness of Mr. Obama’s rise added to the sense of amazement.
“It’s so very exciting,” said Pearl Reynolds, who is 92 and whose elegant bearing and dress belied her hardscrabble origins in tiny Oak Ridge, La., where she worked as a child in the cotton fields.
“I got married at 14 only because I wanted to get out of there,” she said. “I had to. At 14, I was just being promoted from the second grade to the third grade because we could only go to school when we weren’t working in the fields.”
She became quite emotional during Senator Obama’s speech. “Barack Obama is a measure of how far we’ve come as a country since I was a little girl,” she said.
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Mr. Cochran said it would take an hour, “maybe more,” to describe how much Senator Obama’s candidacy meant to him. “I am elated,” he said. “I’m surprised, I—”
His voice broke once again. His tears, and those of so many others, were a measure of the enormity of what had come to pass.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/opinion/30herbert.html?hp
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