Echoing sentiments about Obama

Uriah J. Fields Albemarle County
Published: November 21, 2008

The front-page lead article of The Daily Progress of Nov. 9, “Obama win a life’s work for activist,” featured the reaction of 80-year-old black activist Eugene Williams to the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States. 

Like most Americans, Williams did not believe that he would live to see a black man elected president of the United States. Neither did I.

Williams and his family filed a lawsuit after Charlottesville schools refused a 1955 request to allow black students into white schools, notwithstanding, that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled a year earlier in the Brown v. Board of Education that separate education was unequal.

On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person. 

Four days later, Martin Luther King Jr., myself and some other black leaders in Montgomery, Ala., organized the Montgomery Improvement Association to provide an organizational vehicle to facilitate the bus boycott. Dr. King was elected president, and I was elected secretary of the organization.

Because Williams, a local participant in the NAACP, went to lunch counters where he was refused service, King led the civil rights movement, and others dared to actively oppose segregation, discrimination and disenfranchisement. As a result, 232 years after the founding of America and 145 years after slavery, Obama has been elected president of the United States.

I agree with Williams’ closing words: “Folk like me, those who are my age, we’re tired. The group that has the energy is the young people. Mr. Obama said he cannot do it alone.”

Obama has inspired young people to vote in greater numbers than before. Hopefully, he will continue to inspire them to help America become a “more perfect union.” And as Williams pleads, address poverty. And address the justice system that incarcerates young black men, making America the world’s No. 1 jailer.

I believe the latter is the greatest threat facing black America. Black leaders must call upon President Obama to make the incarceration of black men a must-address issue.