BY AMY DOMINELLO
Media General News Service
DENVER – For years, Wilhelmina Rhoe wanted Hillary Clinton to run for president. Then Barack Obama entered the race, and she did not know which candidate to support.
Ultimately, “I decided I might get a chance to vote for a woman in my lifetime … but I probably won’t get (another) chance to vote for someone like Mr. Obama so I thought I better grab it,” said Rhoe, 71, of Anderson, S.C.
As Democrats prepare to make Obama the nation’s first African-American nominee for president today – the 45th anniversary of the historic “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr. – Rhoe and other African-American delegates who grew up in the segregated South say they did not expect that racial barrier to be broken in their lifetime.
“I wished it and I hoped it, but I never thought I’d be able to see it,” Rhoe said.
In 1958, Alabama state Rep. Barbara Boyd graduated from a segregated high school at a ceremony. In her valedictory speech, Boyd asked her class: “Where will you be 50 years from now?”
At the time, casting a vote to give the Democratic nomination to an African-American seemed like a ridiculous way for Boyd to answer that question.
“Never in my wildest dreams would I have expected this,” said Boyd, a delegate from Anniston, Ala. “To me, this is a dream come to fruition.”
The historic nature of Obama’s nomination in Denver is not lost on younger African-American delegates like Latasha Brown of Atlanta. Brown, 37, was born in Selma, Ala., a hotbed of activity during the civil rights era. Her parents were active in the movement.
“This is what Selma was all about,” she said of Obama’s candidacy.
The vast majority of African-Americans supported Obama in the primaries, but not all. Delegate Fred D. Gray Jr. of Tuskegee, Ala., had long been loyal to the Clintons and believed she was the stronger candidate. Now he is behind Obama.
Some African-Americans, he said, were reluctant to back Obama because they did not think the country was ready to elect an African-American president.
“I think that many didn’t want to get their hopes up too high and some refused to dare to dream that it could really happen,” Gray said. “As time went on and people learned about Barack Obama … we began to believe that the U.S. would truly elect a president based on substance and not on race.”
Rep. Mel Watt, D-N.C., said that the country’s readiness to put an African-American in the White House sends a positive signal to the rest of the world.
“The message it sends to the world on behalf of the nation (is) that we have moved beyond race as the defining factor in our country,” he said.
