Daughter of Slave Votes for Obama

From The Austin-American Statesman

Daughter of slave votes for Obama
109-year-old Bastrop woman casts her vote by mail.
By Joshunda Sanders

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF


Monday, October 27, 2008

Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country's first black presidential nominee.

The middle child of 13, Jones, who is African American, is part of a family that has lived in Republican-leaning Bastrop County for five generations. The family has remained a fixture in Cedar Creek and other parts of the county, even when its members had to eat at segregated barbecue dives and walk through the back door while white customers walked through the front, said Amanda Jones' 68-year-old daughter, Joyce Jones.

For at least a decade, Amanda Jones worked as a maid for $20 a month, Joyce Jones said. She was a housewife for 72 years and helped her now-deceased husband, C.L. Jones, manage a store.

Amanda Jones, a delicate, thin woman wearing golden-rimmed glasses, giggled as the family discussed this year's presidential election. She is too weak to go the polls, so two of her 10 children — Eloise Baker, 75, and Joyce Jones — helped her fill out a mail-in ballot for Barack Obama, Baker said. "I feel good about voting for him," Amanda Jones said.

Jones' father herded sheep as a slave until he was 12, according to the family, and once he was freed, he was a farmer who raised cows, hogs and turkeys on land he owned. Her mother was born right after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Joyce Jones said. The family owned more than 100 acres of land in Cedar Creek at one point, she said.

Amanda Jones' father urged her to exercise her right to vote, despite discriminatory practices at the polls and poll taxes meant to keep black and poor people from voting. Those practices were outlawed for federal elections with the 24th Amendment in 1964, but not for state and local races in Texas until 1966.

Amanda Jones says she cast her first presidential vote for Franklin Roosevelt, but she doesn't recall which of his four terms that was. When she did vote, she paid a poll tax, her daughters said. That she is able, for the first time, to vote for a black presidential nominee for free fills her with joy, Jones said.

One of Amanda Jones' 33 grandchildren, Brenda Baker, 44, said the family is moved by the election's significance to the matriarch.

"It's awesome to me that we have such a pillar of our family still with us," Baker said. "It's awesome to see what she's done, and all her hard work, and to see that she may be able to see the results of all that hard work" if Obama is elected, she said.

Jones lives in a small gray house with white trim just off Texas 21. These days, a curious white kitten and a sleepy old black dog guard the house. Inside are photographs and relics of a long, full life, including a letter from then-Gov. George Bush in 1998 commemorating her 100th birthday. A black-and-white picture of her in a long flapper-style dress was taken between 1912 and 1918 — no one can remember the exact year, Baker said with a chuckle.

Jones is part of a small percentage of active voters above the age of 100 in the state — and the country.

Sister Cecilia Gaudette, a 106-year-old nun born in New Hampshire but living in Rome, made recent national headlines as the nation's oldest voter. But if Texas records are any indication, that's hard to validate.

Secretary of State spokeswoman Ashley Burton said Texas can't confirm whether Jones is the state's oldest active voter because there is too much voter information to sort through. At the county level, there are other challenges. An election official in Hays County said its records are not searchable by age, and Bastrop County elections administrator Nora Cano said that some counties automatically list voters who were born before the turn of the 20th century with birth dates of January 1900.

The oldest active voter in Travis County is 105, officials said, and in Williamson County the oldest is 106 — making Jones the oldest-known active voter in Central Texas.

Making it to see the election results on Nov. 5 is important, but Jones is resting up for another milestone: her 110th birthday in December. "God has been good to me," she said.

Just make me cry, why don't you?

A Talk With The Elders

Found this over at DailyKos:

"I wish I were an Alabama trooper, then I could kill a n****r legally..."
by lollydee [Subscribe]
Sun Oct 26, 2008 at 03:38:42 PM PDT


I had Sunday lunch over my aunt Patsy's house today and she sang those words to the tune of the Oscar Mayer jingle, recalling the summer of 1966 following the riots in Chicago. She was fourteen years old then, and she had never been to the deep South, but she told me that she figured that the mobs there during the open housing march she and her parents were attending probably were just as bad.


"A group of white kids were singing it at us and throwing things while their parents watched them. One white boy just stood there, not saying or doing anything. I thought to myself that maybe that kid would grow up and be different than the trash he was raised in."

My aunt told us that her boyfriend at the time wasn't a fan of Dr. King's non-violent methods, a loyalist instead to the Black Power movement. The Vietnam war was heating up and she thought this might have further radicalized young blacks, contributing to the disintegration of the coalition that had been brought together during the early 1960's.

It's a heavy conversation to have at a casual Sunday lunch, but it's eight days away from maybe electing the first African-American President and no one at the table can talk about much else.

My aunt is an ardent supporter of Barack Obama, but she scoffed a little at me when I talked excitedly about how what is happening now is a revolution, a new uprising.

"You be careful how you handle yourself. People back then got to thinking all crazy and believing all this change was gonna come all of a sudden. Radicals said dangerous things and then even white folks who were behind us started moving away from us. Be prepared for the bumps in the road."

I knew exactly what she meant by that. Whenever a Conservative talks to me about why they believe what they do, I like to remind them that the Conservative movement was a direct response to the Civil Rights movement. I can't help but to wonder what the response will be to electing Obama.

"I don't think McCain and his camp are as bad as the people back then, though. I think that they're really just trying to win an election and are getting a little desperate. They don't believe what a lot of those people do, they just want them to vote for them," my sister said.

My aunt poured herself some juice and sat down, shaking her head.

"McCain is old enough to know what he's doing. Don't you believe that. He might as well be telling those folks that if a black man takes power he's only gonna do stuff for black people, period. That's what they're hearing, if not worse."

My dad nodded his head, "People forget that one of the most profound by-products of the civil rights movement in Mississippi was the rebirth of the Republican Party."

History break: In 1972, two Mississippi Republicans, Thad Cochran and Trent Lott were elected to the House of Representatives. Neither one of them sounded like the Radical Republicans who had once attained power in the state. Both were State's rights advocated and were opposed to further federal civil rights measures like affirmative action. By the 80's they were both in the Senate and then Lott became majority leader in 1996, even though their policies often went against a sizable African American population who now had the right to vote.

Black voters at that point had the power to use their voices to move the struggle forward, but lacked the belief that they could play a major part in the political process. My father calls this "an invisible leash".

Some white people are shocked. The African American turnout is unprecedented. It must be fraud, not this many new voters could be registered. Georgia is close to being blue? North Caroline is in play? Virginia might give it's electoral votes to a Negro?

With the nomination of Barack Obama by the Democratic party, the leash holding back people like my aunt's second husband who grew up in the deep south, once watched his 19 year old cousin get lynched, and has never voted in all of his 78 years, is off.

I know we like to pretend that race in this election is a non-issue, but I think doing so is a great injustice to the descendants of one of the most shameful periods of American history. They are savoring this step forward.

"There is a lot of joy down at the meeting place. (Of a woman's club she belongs to) We all voted early. I worry every time I pick up the paper about someone being hurt like they were way back when," she said. "You all laugh at those videos you send around at those people at them Palin rallys, but I don't thinks its funny."

My Dad got a little indignant. "It's funny because they're so stupid. They can't kill us like they used to by coming and murdering us on the street."

I didn't say anything. It's clear her and my uncle still bear the pain of their past and of the people who died before them.

My aunt raised an eyebrow at him. "There was a nice young white girl over here the other day asking if I needed a ride to the polls. I told her I already sent in my ballot absentee and she told me how excited she was about Obama being elected and asked what I would do on the night he won."

We waited and she didn't say anything. "What will you do?" my Dad finally asked.

"Sleep. But I'm gonna tell Jim (my uncle) to have his gun loaded."

I laughed. "I hope we've gone beyond all that. I think some people will be mad at first, but they'll get over it. We've had black Senators, a Secretary of State. It's not the same. It's also different because the law is on our side this time."

"What about that man that spit on you?"

I though about it for a second. "He spit on me, he didn't beat me up or try to kill me. I'm perfectly unharmed. It was a childish reaction but it was nothing compared to what people back then went through."

"Aha! That's because Obama ain't President yet! Do you think he would have just spit on you if it were November 5th? And what if that story that girl made up about being robbed and beaten by a black man hadn't been proven to be a lie?"

"I don't know," I said.

"That's right. You don't know. I hope we've come far enough, but don't make fun of folks for being afraid of otherwise," she said. "Us old folks know the way this all works," she warned me. "We've been down this road before."

Another history break: The Holocaust revealed to the world the atrocities that could be committed by people driven by an ideology of supremacy and moved quite a few people towards the belief in the ideal of equality for all, but the red scare led by Joe McCarthy came along and erected a hurdle for civil rights activist to overcome. People were so afraid, that they were opposed to social change in general and handed white supremacists a potent weapon in which to smear the opposition. W.E.B. Du Bois was so tarnished by the communist label that he virtually disappeared from American life. Not until McCarthyism subsided did the civil rights movement regain momentum.

Read the paragraph I wrote above, and replace the word "communism" with "un-American".

It's a tough conversation to have. I tried to reassure her. "They can rant and rave all they want, their time is over. People send those videos around because they are in the minority. Their actions make them look ignorant. They're part of the reason McCain and Plain are looking so foolish," I said.

My aunt nodded. "I hope you're right. But now that you and your brothers and sisters are out there on the front lines, I just want you to be cautious and aware of the type of people you're up against."

It's funny to hear her say "front line". I instantly think of the people at the Media, PA office and here at DailyKos. I joke about having a Dem Mafia, but in likelihood, I'd worry more about a game of Trivial Pursuit breaking out at campaign headquarters than a revolution.

But in truth it’s people like us, chatting away in forums like this, who are on the front lines of one of the greatest cultural showdowns in our history.

Racism and prejudice have been at core of the political identity of the Republican party. Even if Obama is elected, he isn't going to be able to excise those qualities overnight. When you get a hard line Conservative into a heated discussion about this election, they always produce a Willie Horton or a Bill Ayers or some other contagious viral smear ready to infect their supporters with fears of terrorism or anti-white prejudice or whatever the code word happens to be this week.

They’re trying it even now, with the McCain campaign running ads showing Obama as darker than he is, next to other blacks in power alongside of a fearful looking white woman, switching a letter in his name to make it become "Osama" to invoke memories of 9/11. They are pulling out all of the stops. If one were to believe everything coming out of that camp, when Barack Obama is elected president, gangs of gay black Muslim immigrants will rape our children so they can force them all to have abortions.

But why not use smears? These tactics almost always worked in the past.

"This year is different, and that's why we're seeing the panic across the aisle. They aren't working anymore," I told her. "Sarah Palin’s claimed that Obama doesn’t see America as "you and I" and people didn't rise up to stand behind her, most people laughed at her."

She shook her head again. "That's good. Stay positive, baby. But just be careful."

I sat back. "I will. But I have to admit I can't wait to see some people's heads explode when he's elected. It's going to be a good day."

I was a little surprised when she frowned at me. "Hold no hatred in your heart. Do you think I'd have lived as long as I have if I held onto that anger?"

Zechariah Chaffee, Jr. once said, "The real value of freedom is not to the minority that wants to talk but to the majority that does not want to listen."

So after this election, the bigger issue of letting go of the anger, at least for me, will be the hardest thing of all.

Thanks for all those who indulged today's navel grazing. Eight more days.....

Listen to the elders. Their caution steadies with our hope.

You Need Inspiration, Here You Go

From CNN.com:

106-year-old voter shares hopes, secrets
By Robert Johnson
CNN

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Ann Nixon Cooper, 106 years old, has seen presidents come and go in her lifetime and has outlived most of them. On a sunny fall morning, she left her weathered but well-kept Tudor home in Atlanta, Georgia, to vote early -- this time for Barack Obama.

The African-American centenarian remembers a time not long ago when she was barred from voting because of her race. Now she hopes to see the day that Obama is elected as the nation's first black president.

"I ain't got time to die," Cooper said with a smile.

"Even if he didn't win, I was happy for him just to be nominated," said the former socialite. "The first black president -- isn't that something, at 106 years old?"

At the Fulton County government center, Cooper was greeted by Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin.

"I thought that I would accompany her today to support her, but also to say to all people that this is a choice we have," Franklin said.

"As all Americans, we should cherish the right to vote and take every opportunity we have to vote our opinions. She is an inspiration to me personally, but she is also quite an inspiration to all Atlanta." Watch Cooper talk about her life and experiences »

Cooper, in a wheelchair and helped by two caretakers, bypassed the long lines of early voters and headed right to the voting machine. Her 106-year-old hands reached out to the 21st-century touch screen to cast her vote for Obama. iReport.com: How do you feel about the election and Colin Powell's endorsement?

Back at her home, surrounded by the elegance of a bygone era, Cooper clutched the photo albums laid out on her dining room table. The longtime socialite and community leader has called Atlanta home since the 1920s. See images of Cooper's day »

She and her late husband, prominent dentist Dr. Albert Cooper, raised four children in this house.

"Our days and nights were just social affairs," she said. The home was a center of Atlanta's black society and the scene of many parties. Celebrities, including the late singer Nat King Cole, dropped in to visit.

"It's been a house with a heap of living going on in it," said Cooper.

She wears a charm bracelet that former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young gave her when she turned 99.

"He adds a charm every year," said friend and caretaker Sally Warner. "Andy says he will have to apply for a loan soon to keep up with Mrs. Cooper."

Cooper danced the electric slide up until the age of 103. She has recently slowed down after suffering several heart attacks and a fractured hip.

On a typical day, Cooper spends hours watching television in her wood-paneled sitting room.

"Her favorite show is 'The Price is Right,' although she is getting used to Drew Carey as the new host," said Warner. Other favorite shows include "Oprah" and "Dancing with the Stars."

When the weather is nice, Cooper spends afternoons on her screened porch, watching traffic go by and reminiscing about old times. Occasionally she leaves the house for an outing.

Cooper was born in Shelbyville, Tennessee, in 1902. She grew up in Nashville with uncles and an aunt who worked as a domestic for wealthy whites.

She married Albert Cooper in Nashville in 1922, and the couple moved to Atlanta. Three of Cooper's four children have died; her surviving daughter is 83. She has 14 grandchildren living and many great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.


When asked about the secret to her longevity, Cooper said, "I don't know how it happened, but being cheerful had a lot to do with it. I've always been a happy person, a giggling person -- a wide-mouthed person!"

To young people, Cooper offers this advice: "Keep smiling. No matter what, you get out and vote. Vote your choice."

First of all, she's looking good for 106!

And second of all, listen to the Elders.

Last Words on TN-9 Congressional Race

But....
But...
But....


I thought Black people ONLY voted for Black candidates. .....

Right?

After all, that's the ONLY reason folks are voting for Obama.

Uh huh.

Congratulations Steve Cohen. May he represent well, the 9th Congressional District of Tennessee.

How Obama Won: The Past Helps The Present

I wanted to write some posts about How and Why Barack Obama won this nomination.

When people say that the past leads to the present, that is truly what it means.

There would be no Barack Obama without Jesse Jackson's run for the Presidency.
Barack Obama wound up getting over 90 Percent of the Black vote. Without it, he would not have won the nomination, and without Jesse Jackson's work previously, those Black votes would not have helped Obama- delegate wise.


The cornerstone of the Obama campaign is that they understood that DELEGATES would win this nomination. Those were the rules, and he set out to win the pledged delegate race, understanding the ins and outs of the Democratic Party rules. In doing so, Obama expanded upon Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy and used it to perfection.

There have been other candidates with the 'appeal' of a Barack Obama. What I mean by that - appealing, as Chris Matthews says, to the ' ideals' of the Democratic Party. There have been repeated ' insurgent' candidates, usually appealing to the more activist, idealist, progressive, more well-educated part of the Democratic Party. And, they were, without exception, save for McGovern, always defeated by the 'Establishment' candidate ultimately.

What made the difference for Obama?

His addition of the Black vote - the most loyal base of the Democratic Party - to the usual 'insurgent candidate' constituency.

The WAY delegates are apportioned in the Democratic Party - not only in a proportional system, rather than the winner-take-all of the Republican Party, but also rewarding districts that have voted LOYALLY for the Democratic Party IN PREVIOUS ELECTIONS with MORE DELEGATES, is the cornerstone of HOW Barack Obama has been able to win, and weather the storm.

There has been no group more loyal to the Democratic Party than Black voters. Erego, when Obama won those Black districts by such large percentages, not only did he beat Hillpatine, but he won more delegates. Hillary could go into a state like Texas, with far more Latino voters than Black voters, but because Black voter participation in PREVIOUS elections was so much higher than the Latino vote, in 2008, winning predominantly Black districts brought more delegates to Obama than Hillary's wins in Latino districts.

I don't believe most Black folk understand that this is how Jesse helped Barack out. Because, it was Jesse Jackson and his think tank, that got this system of distribution put in place as far as delegate allocation; set up that part of the Democratic System. Rewarding PREVIOUS loyalty.

Post North Carolina, Andrew Sullivan wrote the following:

Black Voters Did It

Here's what now seems obvious: African-American voters killed the Clinton candidacy. It is a fitting end to the Clintons' campaign and an almost Shakespearean coda to their career. The Clintons were exposed in their long-running exploitation and reliance on minority votes. No group was more loyal to them than African-Americans; and in the end, like everyone else, African-Americans realized that the Clintons are frauds, disloyal to the core, cynical to their finger-tips, and finally, finally, returned the favor.

After what the Clintons did in this campaign, and what they've revealed about themselves, and their alliance with Fox News and Bill Kristol and Pat Buchanan, this couldn't be more appropriate.

This will be history's verdict: in the end, the Clintons were defeated not by Republicans, but by African-American Democrats. How wonderful. How poignant. In the end, the karma gets you. Maybe it had to be this way. But this final coup de grace against these awful, hollow, cynical people is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

I couldn't agree more with Mr. Sullivan.

I know, at times, that I have seemed very strident on the issue of Hillpatine. But, that's because I felt, in my gut, what the long-term ramifications of her success would be:

The blueprint by which any Black candidate with aspirations higher than a gerrymandered Congressional Seat would be TAKEN OUT.

I didn't see it any other way.

Barack Obama's defeat wouldn't have been the exception; it would have been THE RULE.

And that, was unacceptable.

PERIOD.

When the racebaiting began, it wasn't even about Obama anymore. It was beyond him. It was about whether or not we were going to be shoved to the 'Back of the Bus', politically, to dwell in perpetual serfdom.

Unacceptable.

As a community, I believe we have learned a great deal along the way, and we need not be afraid of it.

Embrace democracy. Be not afraid of it, and if some of the HHH gots-to-go, then they've ' GOT TO GO'.

Black people didn't get their citizenship legally recognized in full until 1965. It's time to grab ahold of this moment, and push forward, recognizing all the work of those who have come before and sacrificed.


************************************

UPDATE: Got this history lesson from a JJP reader

That proportional system was negotiated by Jesse himself:

Superdelegates Should Not Decide the Nominee

In 1988, Dukkakis led in pledged delegates and Rev. Jesse Jackson had accumulated roughly one thousand delegates from the primaries. Prior to ceding the nomination, he brokered a deal called Rule 13B that allowed delegates to be proportionately awarded whenever a candidate obtained at least 15% of the vote, going forward.


Without rule 13B, Hillary wins.

Operation Anti-Chaos: The Narrative on ' White Voters' is FICTION

It's time for those of us who remotely consider ourselves Pro-Obama to fight back and push back on these false narratives that the MSM is trying to spin.

One of those is " Obama can't win the White vote", all the while, NEVER asking Clinton how the hell she intends to win the BASE of the Democratic Party -Black folk - when her standing NOW with them is 59%.

Al Giordano, of the blog, The Field, has come up with an attack plan - use THE TRUTH.

Operation Anti-Chaos: The Narrative on “White Voters” Is Fiction
By Al Giordano

I turn on the TV, read the political columnists (and a significant number of analytically-challenged bloggers, too) and all I hear is a bunch of white folk prattling on about their favorite narrative: “Obama’s losing white voters!”

They’ve swallowed the Clinton racially-obsessed spin, hook, line and sinker. Some, because they are gullible, haven’t an original idea in their little pea brains, and follow the pack of what everybody else is talking about. Others, because they like to toss around knowing falsehoods. Nary a superdelegate can go on Fox News without being berated by an anchorperson screeching (this is pretty close to an exact quote): “But your duty as a superdelegate is to select the most electable and that’s Hillary Clinton!” That these anchorpersons are Republican partisans openly cheering for Senator Clinton is our first clue of the game afoot. One of the major successes of Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos is that it has got all the right-wing pundits and reporters marching lockstep behind the effort to give Clinton enough oxygen to keep slashing away at Senator Obama, who remains the prohibitive likely Democratic nominee.

And when Clinton wins state primaries that, because of demographics, she was always going to win - last week, Pennsylvania and next week, Indiana - they then wave that event up like a blood-soaked flag as proof of their narrative: See? See? We told you so! White people won’t vote for Obama!

So imagine my pleasant surprise this morning to see a New York Times columnist, Charles Blow, who did what none of these chattering lunkheads have done. He looked at the hard data of how voters, white and black, view the two Democratic candidates - favorably or negatively? - and how those views have progressed over time. The data is based on multiple CBS-New York Times polls (among the most respected survey outfits among competing pollsters) over two years and more. Check it out:

Nobody - not blogger, nor superdelegate, nor cable news anchor - should open their mouths with another word about this contest until they’ve studied those graphs and the numbers upon which they are based. Blow explains:

Since January, the Clintons have pummeled Barack Obama with racially tinged comments and questions about his character…

The question is this: Have white Democrats soured on Obama? Apparently not. Although his unfavorable rating from the group is up five percentage points since last summer in polls conducted by The New York Times and CBS News, his favorable rating is up just as much.

Wait. The numbers show that the cynical effort to turn the 2008 campaign into a race riot has hurt the popularity of one candidate among an important demographic, and it’s not Barack Obama:

On the other hand, black Democrats’ opinion of Hillary Clinton has deteriorated substantially (her favorable rating among them is down 36 percentage points over the same period).

So, to sum up: Look at the damn graphs. You can see that Clinton is in a staggering free-fall among African-American voters, her favorability is down 36 points while 17 percent view her more negatively than before, while Obama’s favorable and negative ratings among whites have paired at five point increases. You can even see the small dip - about two percentage points - in his popularity among whites that can be attributed to the news cycles about his ex-pastor, and see that it has leveled out and is now on a straight horizontal line (meanwhile, Clinton’s numbers among blacks continue on an extreme downward precipice). The greater context is that even including Obama’s slight dip, he’s more popular today among white voters than he ever was prior to February.

Not since Ronald Reagan has an American presidential candidate withstood such an assault in the media and seen his popularity not hurt by it, but, rather, galvanized by it. That’s what is meant, in politics, by the term “Teflon.”

Those facts won’t stop many media (and Internet) talking heads from continuing - whether out of gullibility or intentional dishonesty - to prop up the “white voters” narrative, but it ought to inoculate you, kind reader, from believing it.

Don’t let yourself get upset when some idiot repeats the false media narrative. Don’t plead with them to tell the truth (they won’t; remember, they’re either stupid or dishonest). Mock them. Ridicule them. Expose them as the lightweights they are showing themselves to be, with all the confidence that understanding the hard data ought to provide you.

Let Operation Anti-Chaos begin!

**********************************

We need to spread the truth: DIGG this, go to The Field and DIGG the original; Post this on your own blogs; spread the links to this in emails. Send it to the local columnists in your town. Stop the Clinton LIES with THE TRUTH. Electability is a two way problem, and Hillpatine's got SERIOUS Electability issues.It's time to go on the offensive; do something pro-active, instead of re-active.