Inauguration 2009

Ahmad Daniels

Ahmad Daniels talks about why he is attending the Inauguration.

More videos from Charlotte-area residents at the Inauguration:
Harold Robinson

Frances Green

Moving beyond history

Wyllisa Bennett gets ready to board train from Baltimore to Washington.

They walked along Pennsylvania Avenue and the crowd roared. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama looked relaxed and not the least bit cold and – just like that – it was real.

Men jumped on other men’s shoulders to get a better look, parents held children high in the air and throngs of people ran as the first couple walked, as though they did not want to let the new president and his wife out of their sight.

Yesterday, Jan. 19, 2009, it was not real. Obama won the election on Nov. 4, but until he placed his hand on Lincoln’s Bible and repeated the oath of office (after a few back-and-forth stumbles with Chief Justice John Roberts), there was always the fear that “they” would take it away – “on a technicality,” my husband joked.

Maybe that was why so many of us had to be there, to see it with our own eyes. On the train from Baltimore in the early morning and on the streets of Washington, I met old friends and made new ones: three women friends from Los Angeles (one said Obama had the “key match of intelligence and the ability to get it done”), two sisters with no tickets but plenty of optimism, a woman so excited she “couldn’t sleep all night.”

Agnes Coleman of Rhode Island wears pins that pay tribute to prominent African Americans

African Americans who had lived through a very different America needed to see it. Agnes Coleman wore a hat with postage-stamp-style pins that honored Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Ella Fitzgerald and other accomplished black Americans. The 70-year-old from Rhode Island didn’t think she would ever see this day. “We’re like this,” she said, as she puffed her chest out, a little prouder.

Joyce and Clarence Fisher of Gastonia

Joyce and Clarence Fisher, a 60-plus couple from Gastonia, N.C., got their tickets for the swearing-in after Clarence Fisher wrote Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) a letter telling his story. The two North Carolinians (he’s from Reidsville, she’s from Gastonia) met at North Carolina A&T in the 1960’s, where they marched for civil rights. They attended segregated schools and experienced the unequal treatment of the time. They still lived a good life — an all-American life — raising two sons and working in the corporate banking world. Clarence Fisher served his country in the military. His letter made their case.

Then the phone call came – followed by inaugural tickets.
“It’s a monumental event,” said Joyce Fisher, “not only history for African Americans but history for the United States.” She said Obama’s election shows that Americans can “look at a person for being a person.”

“Look how he’s motivating people,” she said, echoing the call to duty and service Obama would make in hi s inaugural speech with the words, “we can do so much more together than we can do alone.”

Denise Delarosa, Rebecca Avila and Barbara Freeman, three friends from Los Angeles, make the trip to Washinton, D.C.

When I heard his words and saw a transfer of power unlike any in our country so far, I realized why I had to defy common sense and head to Washington, D.C. I had to represent my brother Douglass Anthony Curtis. He marched for civil rights, was arrested twice during sit-ins at restaurants. He died of a stroke a few years ago, though I’d like to think he had a front-row seat this day.

In the crowd, I saw a lot of tears, probably for other relatives and friends who paved the way. Today was a time to think of them, and then move forward.

Everyone has placed Barack Obama’s campaign and election in history: from the lessons of Lincoln to the legacy of King.

Jan. 20, 2009, he steps out of the shadows of history and starts to make his own.

Mary C. Curtis

WFAE Inauguration 2009 blogger

Party, poetry, politics and pride

Spike Lee on the red carpet.

Washington is in a partying mood.

Each night leading up to the inauguration of Barack Obama brings more celebrations, more of that particular mix of celebrities, politicians and media folk. Sunday night, the Root inaugural ball also added history. At the party at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History, you could see film director John Singleton ducking into a corner to take a call and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg following Attorney General designate Eric Holder on the red carpet. You could listen to the Howard University Gospel Choir and dance as Biz Markie controlled the music mix.

But right beside the elegant buffet, a not so fancy Woolworth lunch counter with four empty seats reminded the crowd that in February 1960, four North Carolina A&T students started the sit-in movement in Greensboro, N.C. Without their brave demonstration and the sacrifices of others in the civil rights movement, there would not be a president-elect Obama. As the party stretched into the Monday of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, it was a fitting touch.

The Root is a daily online magazine that provides news commentary – sometimes mine — from a variety of black perspectives. This history-making year was a good one for the site, as its editor-in-chief Henry Louis Gates Jr. acknowledged.

I was happy to see colleagues from the campaign trail and newspaper jobs past, from Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post and Jonathan Alter and Howard Fineman of Newsweek. I would have liked a preview of the inaugural poem from Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander, but all I got was a smile. She looked incredibly relaxed for someone about to face a world of literary critics.

It was a simple picture, though, that stopped me, the latest addition to a gallery on the wall of a room of inaugural ball gowns. And under the photo: “Michelle Robinson Obama First Lady 2009-“

Mary C. Curtis
WFAE Inauguration 2009 blogger
View pictures from the event here

Sunday’s message: Continue to dream

It’s a joy and a relief to start a day this weekend not with politics but with prayer.

Sunday morning, a church that has been the place of too many of my family’s funerals was a place of peace, “peace of mind, peace of heart, peace of spirit,” as the Rev. Donald Sterling said in his homily. At New All Saints, my sister’s Baltimore parish, the choir sang “He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs,” which could be the wish of a country, as well.

The Mass and the Men’s Club program that followed looked to Monday’s commemoration of the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. To celebrate the spirit of King, President elect Barack Obama has urged Americans to perform acts of community service in a return to the original meaning of the day.

“You don’t have to have a college degree to serve,” Sterling reminded the congregation. “You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”

Deacon Paul Shelton, the speaker at the Men’s Club program, had a different take on the history that King represented. “How could he have prophesied so many things?” Shelton asked the audience in this predominantly African American church. How could he imagine the children of former slaves sitting down with the children of former slave owners?

Because King looked to the future, because he believed in the possibility of change, was the answer.

Shelton chided black folks who are too quick to reference “the bad, old days.” His marching orders: “Stop being so historical; become more futuristic.” Become more like King in his ability to “look into the darkness and grow stronger.”

So many of us are “so caught up in how bad it used to be,” he said, “we’ve forgotten how to dream.”

Shelton was right. Barack Obama’s achievement is an inspiration.

But now it’s up to the rest of us.

Mary C. Curtis
WFAE Inauguration 2009 blogger