DEL.ICIO.USAtlanta woman, 82, ‘blessed’ to see Obama make history
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
In a cluttered sewing room at the Auburn Neighborhood Senior Center, Ethelene Binion puts finishing touches on a rose-printed pair of flannel pajamas.
“That’s some of my raising as a child,” she says. “I can’t sleep cold.”
LOUIE FAVORITE/lfavorite@ajc.com
Ethelene Binion: ‘It’s exciting to see one of our own race step up to the plate.’
LOUIE FAVORITE/lfavorite@ajc.com
Binion was making a pair of flannel pajamas at the Auburn Neighborhood Senior Center. ‘That’s some of my raising as a child,’ she says. ‘I can’t sleep cold.’
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The cold reminds her of a childhood spent as a poor sharecropper’s daughter in Madison. She could see the stars through a hole in their roof and red dirt through missing floorboards.
As millions of Americans went to the polls to choose a new president, Binion reflected on a simple life of almost 83 years and the hope she has harbored in her heart.
Barack Obama fulfills that hope, she says. He is an embodiment of her lifelong dreams.
But she never imagined she’d live to see a black man become president.
Binion went to work in a white man’s cotton field at the age of 8, when she was old enough to carry a hoe. Her fingers bled. She crawled on her knees, traversing wet ground, picking cotton when it was still moist. That added weight to her burlap bag, which meant more money.
One day, she thought, things will be different.
At age 15, she married so that she could escape the fields and move to Atlanta. She worked at a laundry and put herself through school, acquiring the education denied her in youth.
One day, she thought, all black children will be schooled properly.
She quietly went to the back of the bus. She got her food at restaurants from side windows. She used the restrooms reserved for coloreds.
A white police officer once stopped her on Auburn Avenue. Her husband was dark complected; she was fair and had long braided hair. The policeman accused them of miscegenation.
She heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church and watched in awe as the civil rights movement unfolded around her. Perhaps one day, she thought, King’s dream will be fulfilled.
She became a seamstress and worked in downtown stores — Davidsons, Rich’s and Macy’s — until she retired in 1999. She managed to buy a small house in the Old Fourth Ward in 1959, when black folks first started moving in. That was two years before Obama was born.
She watched Georgia change for half a century. She felt emancipated the day she could walk through the front door of an eatery and not have to sit on the segregated upper floors of the Fox Theatre.
Throughout her life, she never felt bitterness in her heart — not for the racial epithets hurled her way, the discrimination she endured or the opportunities denied a black woman.
She simply held onto memories to remind herself how far she’d come. And she never gave up hope.
“I’m still here, after all I went through,” she says. “I am blessed to be here. To see this day.”
She’s admired other presidents: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, of course, Georgia’s native son, Jimmy Carter. They were good men, she says, who showed sincere concern for the people. But there was something extra special about Obama’s candidacy.
“It’s exciting to see one of our own race step up to the plate.” But it was more than that, she says. “I believe he will make it better for all people.”
At the Auburn senior center, where Binion spends her days, the excitement over the election was brimming Tuesday. Men and women whose lives added up to over a thousand years sat between three colorful acrylic paintings reflecting the civil rights struggle.
On another wall was a collection of Time magazine covers of famous African-Americans. The seniors longed to see the next cover hail President Obama.
Binion knows now she can tell her four great-grandchildren that they can grow up to be whatever they want.
Even president of the United States.
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