I was getting very tired and somewhat disgusted dealing with stories and videos of white Republicans acting like 1960’s-era segregationist assholes. I didn’t like hearing all the anecdotes from white erstwhile-Democrats saying that they’re not voting for the black guy. Shit like that makes me depressed, it hurts my feelings, and it makes me hurt for all the people that are the direct recipients of that hate and ignorance. So, I found tonight’s Washington Post article about how old-time white Democratic organizers in West Virginia have been integrated with the new wave of racially diverse Obama volunteers to be quite a tonic.
The article focuses on Waneta Acker, an 88-year-old retired insurance saleswoman, who has run the one-room Democratic headquarters in Wheeling, West Virginia for the last twenty years running. In her two decades of experience, the small, local black community had not been involved in politics. That changed when Obama secured the nomination in June and some black people started showing up at headquarters to volunteer. But she got a preview in April:
Change suddenly arrived on April 12. That day, at the nearby Carpenters Union, supporters of Barack Obama staged a coup of sorts.
It was the Ohio County Democratic Party’s monthly meeting. On the agenda: choosing delegates for the state Democratic Convention in Charleston, which in turn would elect delegates to the National Convention in Denver.
In place of the dozen or so participants Acker expected, at least 50 Barack Obama devotees showed up, clad in blue T-shirts, baseball caps, and buttons blaring: “PROGRESS.”
“Who are these people?!” Acker demanded. She didn’t know them, “And that’s unusual because I know gillions of people.”
Stranger still, they were “mostly dark, black, African American or what have you.” That’s through Acker’s eyes. In fact, less than one in three of those Obama-backers were black, though that is still a relatively large ratio in this 93 percent white town. To Acker, anyway, it looked like a flood of strange newcomers.
Acker’s first response was defensive. These people were encroaching on her turf, and she wasn’t sure they were friendly.
Acker feared “retaliation” for ancestral sins. “Black people were treated horrible in the past and might start showing the white people what it’s like,” Acker mused. Maybe they’ll “get cocky” if Obama wins.
Even if he didn’t win, she feared that Obama’s candidacy could hurt local Democratic candidates. If the headquarters is covered in Obama paraphernalia, Acker wondered, “How many white people will come in the office? That’s what I’m looking forward to [seeing].”
In June, with the nomination sewn-up, Acker’s fears got put to the test. The order came down from Chicago that the local Democratic office would be completely absorbed, or ‘integrated’, with the Obama campaign. Keep in mind that this story was repeated all over the country. The old guard was now on orders to be hospitable to the new guard. The 88 year-old Acker wasn’t very comfortable with that idea.
If the Obama campaign and the Democratic headquarters merged, Acker worried, maybe Obama supporters wouldn’t work hard for their local Democrats. Maybe they wouldn’t pay their dues. Maybe they’d try to oust her.
She wagged a finger. “They’re not going to rule me! If they think they are going to come in there and push me around, no way. No way!”
But Acker had nothing to worry about. The Obama volunteers were not looking to avenge historical wrongs, nor were they looking to push her out.
Acker dates the beginning of the two camps’ integration to July 24, the opening of the Italian Festival on the waterfront. She was busy setting up the Democratic Party booth when some of the Obama newbies approached her and offered their help passing out local politicians’ fliers and registering voters.
“I didn’t know them from a load of coal,” she remembers, “But they knew what they were doing” with their forms, their talk of health care and their relentlessness. “Just talking to them, I saw what nice people they were.”
That must be a very West Virginia saying…’I didn’t know them from a load of coal.’ I like it. What Ms. Acker was learning is what is learned anytime blacks and whites work together without prejudice. Our differences are smaller than our common interests. And people are pretty much the same all over. Flash-forward to today, and Acker has been thoroughly de-programmed. Her fears have melted away.
And the same local white Democrats kept coming to the headquarters, despite the life-sized cutouts of Obama. “I was surprised so many of them [white Democrats] have changed,” says Acker. “Where they didn’t accept the fact that he was colored, now they’ve changed their attitude. Really.”
“I also had some concern because he was colored that they [Obama volunteers] might turn the table on us here, but now when I see the way people have really worked together and banded together, I see a different way.”
“It’s a different era,” she muses. “I accept it.”
This is a beautiful story that is just a microcosm of what is going on all over this country. Ms. Acker still calls black people ‘colored’. But, just as Sen. Robert Byrd came full circle from his KKK-past to endorse Obama in the primary, Ms. Acker, at eighty-eight, has accepted a new era. That’s progress. That’s a whole lot more healthy than a Sarah Palin rally.
