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Saturday, November 1, 2008
Group pride in a member’s success
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Nathaniel Brown has never voted for a Republican. It’s a track record that will continue Tuesday when the retired civil rights activist gingerly makes his way to the ballot booth. A stroke and heart attack have slowed the Norcross resident. His health, he jokes, will prove handy come Nov. 4.
“I won’t have to wait,” he said, chuckling.
Brown experienced first-hand the segregation and inequality that many of us have only read about. As a school-bus driver, he drove a “relay bus” that ferried the Norcross-area’s black students to Duluth. There, they’d catch another bus that took them to an all-black school.
In the mid-1960s, he helped lead a successful, violence-free effort to integrate the county’s public schools. The Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Norcross’ downtown Thrasher Park to protest the start of the school year.
It’s history that’s as fresh in the 77-year-old’s mind as the current presidential bid that pits Sen. Barack Obama against Sen. John McCain. For Brown, the thought of a black man possibly occupying the West Wing is something he never thought he might see.
“My generation,” he said. “We’re almost extinct.”
In America, race is everything. To that end, much has been made of the overwhelming support blacks have given the Obama candidacy. Some political pundits have attributed the support to skin tone and skin tone only.
How insulting. They know full well the support runs deeper than that, that it’s greater than the candidate’s melanin. Concerns about the economy and dwindling retirement funds are on everybody’s minds, regardless of color.
Besides, blacks typically vote Democrat. Democrat John Kerry nabbed 88 percent of the black vote in the 2004 presidential race. In the November 2000 presidential contest, Democrat Al Gore received 90 percent of the black vote nationally.
Still, there’s a ring of truth to the notion that familiarity and likeness hold political sway. At the very least, they are factors that can open the door, make folk listen, even if they vote otherwise. Everybody likes “one of their own.”
Mitt Romney, the 2008 Republican presidential hopeful, spent millions of his own money, but he benefited greatly from donors of the Mormon church, especially in Utah. When John F. Kennedy became the first Roman Catholic president of the United States, practitioners of the faith felt, generally, that they had arrived. That they had become part of the political process. That they had broken the barrier.
It would be no different with Obama, should he succeed.
“I guess it would be one of the most historical things that I have ever seen,” Brown said. “Most of my kids have gone and voted. They keep saying, ‘Daddy, why don’t you go vote?’ But I told them, this year, I won’t have to wait in the back of a line.
“I have the advantage.”
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