Something different was in the air in 2008. I could feel it. I sensed it in the way people whispered about this young guy with a funny name and big ears. I could see it on their faces, so full of hope even in the middle of an economic train wreck we’d later call the Great Recession. Their voices were hushed with restrained excitement, as if the thing they’d never believed was possible might actually happen. Maybe, just maybe, we might see a black man become president.
I’d heard Barack Obama’s name for a couple years by then. I’d even met him once in 2007 at a fundraiser. He was a US senator back then and just starting his run for president. I got to shake his hand on that freezing winter day.
Those of us in Roseland felt a particular claim to Obama as one of our own. Years earlier, he had gotten his start as a community organizer in Roseland’s church basements and neighborhood centers. Neighbors remembered fanning themselves in the summer heat, spellbound by this fiery young man speaking so passionately he might as well have been preaching. Everybody said there was something about him, even then. This man was going places, they’d said. And now, here he was, running for president.
Most of the kids in my program didn’t pay much attention to the news unless it showed up on BET. I don’t normally talk about current events with them beyond who got shot on the block and which gangs are into it these days. But this was different. This was historic. And they needed to hear about it.
The kids, however, weren’t so sure when I showed them Obama’s picture in the newspaper. DaJuan straight-up rolled his eyes at me like I was crazy.
“Miss Diane, didn’t Jesse Jackson run for president too?” he scoffed.
“Well, yeah.” I thought back to Reverend Jackson’s historic run in the ’80s, when I dared to hope he would win. “But this time is different.”
Jamal laughed darkly. “They ain’t gonna let no black man up in the White House.”
I couldn’t blame them. I grew up thinking a black president was impossible. Sometimes I allowed myself to dream, to imagine how my life might be different if somebody who looked like me sat in the Oval Office. Somebody who understood my background, my struggles, my needs. But I always shrugged those dreams off quickly. That’s never gonna happen, I told myself then.
On the South Side, it sure didn’t feel like you stood much of a chance getting ahead in the world if you were black. In our eyes, white people held all the power, both in private life and in politics. Being black felt like an automatic disqualifier for any high-level position. I’m often dismissed as an angry black woman for speaking out in a community meeting or am turned down for a grant that inevitably goes to a white person no more qualified than me.
But I couldn’t stop hoping. I couldn’t stop dreaming that people would change, that the world would get better. And my KOB kids wouldn’t give up hoping either, not if I could help it.
“Anything’s possible,” I told them each time I brought up Obama’s name. “Don’t count him out.”
“Miss Diane, please,” they’d protest. I’d have to whip out my pen to shut everybody up.
“Don’t be negative,” I always said. “You never know.”
These conversations went on for months. They kept on going, through the spring primaries and long after Obama clinched the Democratic nomination. “See!” I said gleefully. “You never thought he’d get nominated, and here he is!”
That wasn’t enough for them. “Miss Diane, he’s from here,” Jamal said, shaking his head. “You really think they’re gonna let him up in there?”
“Well you’re eighteen, and you ain’t even registered. How’s he supposed to win when none of y’all can vote?”
I wasn’t going to let these kids sit on their behinds on Election Day. These kids would get their voting cards if I had to drag them to the registrar’s office by their dreads.
I knew where they were coming from. I didn’t vote when I was eighteen. Matter of fact, I didn’t vote until I was in my thirties. Voting was something other people did. It never felt important to me. Maybe that feeling started when I was a kid. My mom and grandma talked about voting like it was for grown folks. And our polling location was so far from our house that if they had to work or ran short on time, they just didn’t vote. My mom felt her vote was important, but she never pushed it on us kids as something we should do.
By the time I was grown, I didn’t give voting a second thought. I was so busy raising my babies and working odd jobs I wasn’t going to trek out to my polling place and check a bunch of names on a ballot.
When I was in my early thirties, something changed. I thought about all the time I spent complaining about my city councilman not standing up for the neighborhood, or the state investing in every community but mine. That’s when it hit me—I complained about all these people when I didn’t even bother to vote against them. Men and women who lived before me fought tirelessly for me to have the right to vote, and I treated that right like trash. The more I thought about it, the more ashamed I felt. So I drove to the city clerk’s office and registered. I remember looking at that voter ID card and feeling like I was really somebody.
When the next mayoral election came, I marched out to the polls with my head high and my chest out. I felt grateful, proud, powerful. That’s still how I feel when I take a selfie wearing my “I voted” sticker. Everybody knows I’ll put up a post on social media with the caption, “I voted, did you?”
My KOB kids weren’t so easily convinced. They didn’t know how to do it, they didn’t want to take the time, they thought it was stupid—this, that, and the other. But when the polls showed Obama with a lead over Senator John McCain, their heads perked up. Their negativity disappeared. They were singing a different tune when I brought up Obama. They talked about him like he was the coming savior of Chicago. The way they talked, you’d think every single one of us would be rich and live in mansions once Obama was president. We sat together dreaming of how Obama would come in and sweep the streets of Chicago and change everything. They wanted to know everything about him—who his wife was, how many kids he had, how long he’d been in politics, you name it. I had to laugh listening to these kids buzzing about somebody they hadn’t wanted to hear two words about just a few months earlier.
“Y’all want Obama to be president so bad, you need to get registered,” I told them each time his name popped up in conversation. “Y’all need to vote.”
Just before the voter registration deadline, I piled every last kid who would be eighteen by Election Day into our two vans. We must have crammed nearly forty in there. James and I had planned to bring them to the city registrar’s office, but when we heard about a big voter registration drive going on nearby, we changed course and headed there instead.
These kids’ eyes were wide as saucers as they walked into the Operation Push drive at a church on 50th and Drexel. Music blared over the noise of chattering teenagers. I could see Jesse Jackson standing off to the side, taking pictures with kids. Local reporters scribbled in their notebooks and stood holding microphones in front of cameras. The air was electric with excitement, and it was contagious.
Anybody who might have been reluctant to vote was practically jumping up and down to get in line and register. I stood back and watched them, beaming. Some of these kids had been with me from the beginning—Jamal, DaJuan, Senneca, Isiah, Brittany, even Aisha. I’d spent the last five years watching them grow up. These kids had voices. All their lives, they thought their voices didn’t matter. Like I thought mine didn’t matter. But now, their voices would be heard.
By the time we all loaded back into the vans, every last one of those kids was all amped up with energy. I felt like I was in the car with a bunch of five-year-olds. They wanted to know what their voter card did and if they’d have to show it if they applied for a job, and they wanted to know what Jesse Jackson did and on and on and on. My patience was all but gone after a day of carting them around and keeping an eye on them. I kept responding with one-word answers, except when I turned and scowled, “Didn’t you just ask me that already?” I could only imagine James hollering at the kids in his van to hush their mouths.
By Election Day, some of that excitement had worn off. After registering thirty-eight kids, I could only convince twenty-one of them to come with me and cast their ballots. Once again, we loaded into the van, and I drove them to the senior citizens building over on State Street, where I figured we wouldn’t have to fight a big crowd.
I’m sure the building had been quiet before we walked in, but that ended the moment the first kid pushed the door open. All of them were laughing and carrying on like they were in a school cafeteria, their voices echoing off the high ceilings. The older folks serving as election workers weren’t too happy about it. They frowned and shushed us like a bunch of librarians. Calm down, y’all, I thought. It’s their first time voting. Give them a break.
If I hadn’t been trying to get these kids out of there as fast as possible, I would have been laughing my head off. None of them had ever seen a voting machine before. They’d never taken an official marker and filled out a ballot. A boy named Jaleb kept marking the side of his ballot and then couldn’t understand why the voting machine wouldn’t accept it.
“I ain’t voting,” he shouted after the machine spit out his ballot for the second time. “This is too hard.”
I could see Senneca tossing down her marker in frustration. “I don’t know any of these people!” she whined. “All I know is the president. Who are all these judges and regents?”
I shook my head and laughed. These were tough, hard young people. These were kids who didn’t let the threat of drive-bys and gang fights keep them off the streets. And now they were intimidated by a machine and a sheet of paper.
By the time we all finally voted, not one of them would put on their “I voted” sticker. They refused to take a picture with me, shouting that they “ain’t no punks.” But when we walked out of there, I felt like I’d just won an election myself. These strong, black teenagers had power just by casting their vote.
That night, nobody turned on the TV. We stayed as far away from the news as possible. We kept on doing what we normally did: singing, doing homework, writing poetry, anything to take our minds off the election results pouring in across the country. We knew what the polls said. We knew Obama’s chances were good. And yet we were terrified. The kids’ words echoed through my head: “They ain’t gonna let no black man in there.” Even the craziest conspiracy theories seemed plausible that night. What if somebody fixed the election? I worried. What if this whole thing is rigged just to keep a black man out of the White House?
And then I heard it. Outside, a voice screamed in the silence, piercing through the darkness.
“He won! He won!”
I rushed to my window. There was my neighbor, standing on her porch, screaming as if she’d just won the lottery. “Obama won!”
Could this be real? Could this really happen? One by one, houses in my neighborhood lit up. Neighbors ran out of their houses, all of them screaming. That’s when I knew. It was true. America had its first black president.
The kids and I hugged one another and shouted at the top of our lungs as we ran onto my porch to join the celebration. One boy rushed right past us and into the street, pounding on passing cars and even a bus, screaming that Obama had won. My sister, who was at my house, came running downstairs doing her yodel, hollering, “Yiyiyiyiyi!” as Aisha joined in with her. James grabbed the phone and called up every family member he could think of, just to share in the moment with them. And we finally switched on the TV to see the good news for ourselves.
In the middle of the chaos, I turned to see my mom standing in the living room. Her face said it all. “I lived to see this,” her bright smile told me. “After all I’ve lived through, I saw a black man be elected president.”
“Let’s go downtown!” the kids yelled, tugging at my sleeve. “Let’s go watch Obama’s speech!” As we spoke, Barack Obama and his family were on their way to Grant Park for his acceptance speech.
I was tempted. Watching him take the stage would be a historic moment unlike anything I’d ever witnessed. But then I remembered the night the Bears won the Super Bowl. It was back in the eighties, and James and I drove downtown to celebrate our hometown team’s victory. We returned to our car that night to find it had been trampled by people running out of the bars. The last thing I needed was for a euphoric crowd to destroy our vans. I’d have to be content with watching history happen on my TV.
As President-elect Obama took the stage, I stared at the TV with tears in my eyes, watching him smile and wave to the crowd next to his wife, Michelle, and his little girls, Malia and Sasha. Hope washed over me. The kids felt it too. If America could elect a black president, anything was possible. In a neighborhood that felt hopeless most of the time, this election night was a glimpse of something different. This was proof that these kids had hope, too, beyond the streets and violence. Maybe now they’d believe it.
When I heard a group called Safety Net had rented charter buses to take kids to President Obama’s inauguration, I jumped at the opportunity. KOB kids had already played a role in getting Obama elected. Now I wanted them to see the fruits of their labor. I arranged for us to stay in dorms at Howard University while we were in Washington, DC. Not only would these kids get to watch President Obama be sworn in, but they would also step foot on a college campus, some of them for the first time in their lives. I wanted them to see what was possible if they applied themselves. I wanted them to think about their futures and the steps it would take to get there.
The air was a few degrees below freezing when we stepped off the charter bus and trekked toward the National Mall. We were shoulder to shoulder with crowds all headed in the same direction. I wasn’t worried about keeping track of everybody in that sea of people. I’d done it so many times at block parties and on bus trips that it was second nature to me now. You couldn’t walk without stepping on somebody or somebody stepping on you. But everywhere you looked, people were smiling. I didn’t come across a single person who wasn’t excited.
We’re from Chicago, so we were used to cold weather, but the wind felt especially cold as it cut through our heavy coats.
“Miss Diane, it’s freezing!” they complained now and then.
“Y’all be quiet!” one of the older kids would say. “Don’t you know how big this is?”
But everybody forgot about the weather as we finally reached the grassy mall and scrunched in next to strangers. Aisha’s jaw dropped as she saw the Washington Monument behind us and the US Capitol in front of us. The steps where President Obama would be sworn in were too far away to see, even if you squinted, but giant screens were set up with speakers so you could see and hear everything. I didn’t care how far back we were. I just wanted to be there.
As I watched President Obama place his hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, I felt like it wasn’t real. Like somebody else was there watching, and I was looking on in the background. I had to pinch myself just to remember it wasn’t a dream. The kids didn’t laugh or joke even once.
We were all still in disbelief as we toured the Capitol and visited other monuments. We walked the halls of Howard University, where I pointed out pictures of famous alumni like Toni Morrison, Anthony Anderson, and Sean “Puffy” Combs. “That could be you up there one day,” I told them. We sat around laughing and joking with Howard students and listened as they told us about their classes, their majors, and their goals. I could see some of the older kids leaning forward with interest.
By the time I loaded them back onto the bus for the twelve-hour drive home, these kids thought they could single-handedly take on the world. They were inspired, hopeful, brimming with confidence.
I just wish that feeling would last, I thought. I knew what would happen when they returned home. Their gangs, their poverty, their war-torn streets would be right there waiting for them. It wouldn’t be long before hopelessness would creep back in. The high they were riding now would come crashing down.