“Yes We Did”
© Janus Adams 2008
 
Published: Hearst Newspapers, Connecticut
November 9. 2008
 
 
On a personal note … this is where my head went on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008:
 
In 1971, I was a young journalist covering Cairo, Illinois where — six years after the Voting Rights Act and three years after Dr. King’s assassination — African Americans were under siege by our own government and fellow citizens for daring to vote.
 
The Battle of Cairo broke out when a returning Black Vietnam vet in uniform was arrested on a traffic stop and (in the code of the day) “hung himself” in his jail cell. African Americans in that 50/50 Black/White town determined to vote no matter the cost.
 
Reporting the story, I spent a harrowing night crouched on the floor with Cairo’s Black residents dodging the bullets of sheriffs and their deputies whose practice it was to enforce the law (of White supremacy) every few nights.
 
Two weeks later, I was riding in a caravan of Civil Rights workers when state troopers forced our cars off the road. At gunpoint, they arrested several of the men and one woman. Once in custody, as we later learned, the woman was beaten mercilessly by troopers demanding “the tapes, the tapes.” They thought she was “that reporter” — me. 

The next day my hosts put me on the floor of the back seat of a car, piled blankets and papers on top of me, drove to the Paducah, Ky. airport, and deposited me on the first plane home to New York.
 
So, imagine how I felt on Election Day. A victim, I knew what it meant to face being lynched. A victor, I know what it means to vote for the first African-American president.

With this and other memories shuddering through me, with my experience just one infinitesimal drop in the sea of grief inflicted in the names of “empire,” “exploration” and “race,” there was no way that I was going to the polls to vote alone.
 
On my finger, I placed my parents’ wedding band. How would this day have come for me without them? In my ears, I wore earrings from my late ex-husband, Max Roach, the better to hear his music — especially his “Tender Warriors” (for the children of the Civil Rights movement) and his “Freedom NOW Suite” (commemorating the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation). In my bag were pictures of my grandparents. In my heart, were generations in the freedom fight. And we went to vote for Barack Obama — and we won. Yes we can. Yes we did.
 
Even now, I am having a difficult time taking it in. Even now, I can barely express the transcendent joy of it all without noting this, too: I am unbelievably thankful that Senator McCain lost and “that one” won.  The McCain/Palin campaign made me feel my life was in danger — and, had they won, it was.
 
McCain’s “he’s not one of us” yielded Governor Palin’s “Our opponent is someone who sees America …  as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” This, to crowds still believing the propaganda that Iraq perpetrated September 11th; crowds that matched Palin’s incendiary taunts with “kill him” and insults hurled at a black cameraman.
 
That McCain withdrew a microphone from a supporter who was afraid of Obama doesn’t cut it. Palin’s “pit bull with lipstick” speeches were crafted by the McCain campaign. They rallied ignorance and fear.
 
That Obama won a landslide in the Electoral College is cause for celebration; that 46% of the electorate drank McCain’s hate-filled KoolAid should give us pause.
 
The ache of tears that burst forth on election night was not just for long ago trauma but for memory as recent as the police shooting of Sean Bell and the terror revisited in the rhetoric of 2008.
 
Thankfully, Hope and a desire for Change won. Yes we did.
 
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www.janusadams.com