from globe.com
Excitement for Obama candidacy palpable among many black residents
Email|Print| Text size – + By Lisa Wangsness
Globe Staff / January 27, 2008
COLUMBIA, S.C. – When Mae Golston voted for Barack Obama yesterday, she was thinking about her father. A sharecropper with a sixth-grade education, he was not allowed to finish his schooling because he had to work.
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more stories like this”He would have loved this,” she said, as her 5-year-old daughter, S’honna, skipped and scampered about W.A. Perry Middle School in downtown Columbia. “He would have loved this.”
Polling places saw heavy turnout yesterday in South Carolina, the first Southern state on this year’s Democratic nominating calendar and the first with a heavily African-American electorate. A win for Obama, the first viable African-American presidential candidate in history, could bode well for him in other states with sizable black populations.
In the state that was first to secede from the Union before the Civil War and that still flies the Confederate flag in front of its State House, excitement about Obama among African-American voters was palpable.
Cynthia Cook, 58, a retired nurse, was beaming as she left an adult education center in downtown Columbia after casting her vote for Obama. “I lived through the civil rights era, and he is a dream come true,” she said.
Andre Young, a 36-year-old chef from Columbia, started out a Clinton supporter, but after he saw Obama speak at a massive rally with Oprah Winfrey in December, he changed his mind.
“It was exciting to see both of them in the same place, and the African-American community all unified, without some foolishness or violence, for something positive,” said Young.
Not all black voters who backed Obama, however, said their decision was based on race. Lonnie Dickerson, a 48-year-old truck driver from Columbia, said he would be happy with Obama or Clinton, but he went with Obama because he decided the Illinois senator had been the clearest and most consistent advocate for sweeping changes in Washington.
“I just liked his message,” he said. “This country really cries out for real change.”
For many voters – particularly women, who had the chance to nominate a viable female candidate for the first time – yesterday’s choice was a wrenching one. Barbara Pate, a 61-year-old dental office manager who is white, was so torn that that before she entered her polling place, she sat in her car and prayed for guidance.
Both candidates, she said, had the leadership qualities, empathy for working-class people, and a deep understanding of the issues. But when she walked into the voting booth, she decided to go with Clinton.
“I would vote for Obama in a few years, when he gets a little more experience,” she said. “The experience was the whole thing in a nutshell.”
Rachael Holland, a 38-year-old middle school teacher from Irmo, said she was torn between Clinton and Obama, but wound up siding with Obama because the Clinton campaign had spent too much time attacking Obama and because President Bill Clinton appeared to have had such a strong influence on his wife’s campaign.
“If he says something, everyone’s paying attention to what he says,” she said. “I think that takes a lot away from her. People can’t see her as an independent person.”
Janice Lee, 46, a Democrat from Irmo, said that for her as an African-American woman, it was “an amazing thing” to have the choice of voting for a woman or a black man. Lee, who recently lost her customer service job and her health insurance along with it, decided to go with Clinton, saying the New York senator offered the most concrete plans for healthcare and strengthening the economy.
Shirley Daniels, 72, a registered independent who is a full-time caregiver for her son, who has muscular dystrophy, voted for John Edwards, in large part because she trusts him to be a good steward of the Medicaid and Medicare programs her son depends on to survive.
“I feel he is more for the middle class-to-poor people,” she said.
Lisa Wangsness can be reached at lwangsness@globe.com.
