Local reaction to Obama: Stunned

For those who had waited so long, it happened so fast. Barack Obama was like a fast car that suddenly appeared over the brow of a hill and was on their rear bumper before they had time to react.

Speed up or move over.

“It seemed like he came out of nowhere,” Gill Cobbs said. “I never even heard of him two years ago.”

And before he could come to terms with this new phenomenon called Obamamania, the former Lynchburg City Council member — one of a handful of African-Americans to be elected to any office in Central Virginia — had to first wean himself away from Hillary Clinton.

“I always liked Hillary,” Cobbs said, “and I thought she’d do a good job as president. But when Obama came along, I had to reconsider.”

A woman as president was unheard of. The prospect of a black man — or even, in Obama’s case, a man of mixed race — in that job was mind-blowing.

“I’ve waited all my life for either a woman or a black person to be elected president,” said longtime Lynchburg Voter’s League activist Yvonne Ferguson earlier this year. “Now, we’ve got both with a chance for it, and I have to make a choice.”

As of Tuesday, the choice has apparently been made. Obama won the Montana primary, giving him enough delegates to lock in the Democratic nomination, including support from superdelegates. Walter Fore, another battle-scarred veteran of the civil rights movement, was still letting it sink in on Wednesday morning.

“This is a great day for America,” Fore said. “I remember when we (local blacks working for political change) were meeting in secret places. I remember when we elected people we thought would be spokespersons for us, then found out they were going to let us down and do what they had to do.”

Fore has spent most of his working life as a labor union official and organizer, and to him all the bad stuff was rolled into the same ball — racial discrimination, job discrimination, mistreatment of workers, all of it.

“We’ve got a lot of problems in this country right now,” he said, “and whoever wins in the fall, Obama or McCain, is going to have his hands full.”

Yet he, too, was startled by Obama’s sudden rise.

Landmark change often seems to happen like that. The Cold War dragged on for more than 50 years, and then one day the Berlin Wall came down. Overnight, or so it appeared, the Internet hit the communications world with the impact of a tsunami. Black Americans had been struggling to achieve social and political equality since before the Civil War, and now … Obama.

But not so fast. None of these things could have happened without the dogged efforts of thousands of people struggling to achieve incremental change. It’s like the metaphor of the man hitting a concrete wall 1,000 times with a sledgehammer, with no apparent effect. Then he hands the sledgehammer to someone else, and it collapses with the first swing — not because the second assault was any more powerful, but from the accumulated effect of the other 1,000 blows.

There could not have been a Barack Obama without a Martin Luther King Jr., or a Rosa Parks, or a Jackie Robinson, or even a Jesse Jackson.

“I think the thing that has excited people about Obama is that he’s new,” said Lynchburg City Council member Ceasor Johnson, who has also served as president of the Campbell County NAACP. “For so long, it seemed that people were nominated because it was their turn.”

Like it was Hillary Clinton’s turn — and when you think about it, it would have been more prudent for Obama to wait. Let Clinton get the nomination, possibly get elected, and then see how she fared trying to deal with a failing economy, the war in Iraq, and the myriad other patches of quicksand lining her path. Or, if the Republican candidate won and failed to make things better, Obama would have an even stronger case in 2012, when he would still only be 50.

But he was impatient, felt driven to make a move now, and it paid off.

“He was at the right place at the right time,” said Gill Cobbs.

And he got there in a hurry.