The SacrificeWhile it evoked dancing in America’s streets and a new national holiday in Kenya, President-elect Barack Obama’s acceptance speech Tuesday night was met with a quieter joy by two civil rights leaders in Talladega County. Forty years ago they actively fought for the right of black people to vote, and they remember Bloody Sunday as a dark blot in the pages of America’s history book.
“I’ve been like everybody else: trying to savor the moment, trying to understand it, trying to define it; trying to explain it even to myself,” said an overwhelmed Horace L. Patterson Sr. of Talladega.
“It is a dream come true,” said Charles Woods of Childersburg. “I think it is a great day for America. We have truly shown that we are a country; that we’re united, and we have truly lived the dream of the Constitution.”
Patterson and Woods not only journeyed the road that led to the election of the first black man to the highest office in America; they helped to pave it, with their decades of involvement in civil rights activism. It was the same kind of hard work that President-elect Obama called upon Tuesday night for the purpose of remaking the nation, but this time as equals: “block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.”
Patterson and Woods both fought particularly hard for the equal right of African-Americans to vote, and witnessed the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed that right to Americans of every race and color.
Obama mentioned in his acceptance speech 106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper of Atlanta, Ga., who cast her ballot on Tuesday for the presidential election and who, Obama said, “was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma…”
And right there at the bridge in Selma, marching to protest the disenfranchisement of black voters was Patterson, then only 17 years old. He vividly recounts in his autobiography the blood spilled that March day in 1965 at the hands of state troopers, “who wielded clubs, whips, and iron pipes.”
“I heard the sounds of whips whistling through the air as they cut into the flesh of a person whose only crime was his or her desire to have the same respect that other people took for granted,” he wrote.
It was only a few months after Bloody Sunday that the Voting Rights Act passed, to be re-voted on every 20 years; but Patterson said he still never believed he would live to see the day a black man achieved the highest office in this country. The magnitude of this new reality is amplified by the fact that President-elect Obama has received this office by the same election in which many African-Americans were prevented from participating only a few decades ago.
The right is worth it
Woods, who served for several years as president of the Alabama chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, took the right to vote a step further. In a collaborative effort with then-Secretary of State for the state of Alabama Don Siegelman, Woods enacted equity in voter registration laws and enhanced registration to ensure black people were registered to vote before they graduated from high school.
Even with those efforts, until this year’s presidential campaign, many minorities still took for granted their right to vote, despite the great sacrifices paid to earn it.
“One of the reasons why many young people have not been engaged in the voting process is, they did not feel that it mattered,” said Patterson.
But Obama’s campaign inspired many voters with a sense of empowerment and a sense of their ability to effect change that they had never felt before, he said, adding that he believes the election was another turning point for voters. Only this time, the challenge they overcame was not that of earning the right to vote, but of exercising it.
“I think that people are going to be challenged to become engaged in the process, and if people are engaged in the process, then of course in the future they will continue to exercise and treasure the right to vote,” Patterson said.
Woods said one of his greatest hopes for Obama’s tenure is that he is able to permanently secure the Voting Rights Act and abolish its mandatory periodic reconsideration.
Reflecting on the horror of what occurred in Selma four decades ago in light of the historic events of this Nov. 4, Patterson said he cannot help but think that it has been worth the sacrifice.
“I cannot help but say, it was worth it all,” he said. “And so much of me would prefer that many of those folks who have paid the ultimate sacrifice could actually see this hour they dreamed of. It is a wonderful thing, not just for one group of people, but for all of us, because America can never be what it ought to be until we are all walking together in a sense of unity.”
That sense of unity is the key in this victory, Patterson said, and it is for this that civil rights leaders in the past fought; it is for a new kind of unity that President-elect Obama now sacrifices.
“You could see in the faces of those people gathered in [Grant Park the night of the election],” said Patterson. “It was America: old, young, rich, poor—it didn’t matter, we were all one, and you could feel and see this sense of celebration. It wasn’t just about Obama winning, it was that we. W-E won. This country, this diverse nation—we won.”
