No doubt the saddest part of last week's historic and emotional election was the fact that Barack Obama's grandmother did not live to see the results.
It had me remembering my own grandmother in Port Orange, who went to bed eight years ago thrilled that Florida had been the state to elect Al Gore our President. Waking up to the reality of exactly the opposite was hard for her to take.
She didn't live to see these election results, but she would have liked Barack Obama. And maybe even more important to her, she would have liked Michelle, too.
I was just 10--though it is still so fresh in my mind--when she said, "If we could only elect our President by voting for the First Lady, I would vote for Muriel Humphrey every time." Without question, she would have voted for Michelle Obama's grace, ease and smarts over Cindy McCain's pinched perfection. There would not have been kind words for Sarah Palin's rightwing bumbling ignorance, either.
Grandma, who was born in 1910, would also get emotional remembering her own childhood. She'd speak with anger and tears with the memory of being disciplined because she'd wanted to befriend a little black girl.
But it was a memory of another mother--who never lived to be a grandmother--that brought me to tears on election night. A CNN commentator spoke of the unifying force of this new president, that this win was for all of us, especially for the memory of Viola Liuzzo. Liuzzo was the inspiration of much of my civil rights artwork, and her story speaks to the idea that change belongs to us all.
And then I found this link, about Liuzzo and her friend Sarah Evans, neither of whom lived to see a black president, but who had a part in making it happen.
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2005/04/12/nissen.sarah.and.viola.affl?iref=videosearch
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