[first diary: be kind...]
Oh, no. I woke up this morning to learn that Barack is on his way back to Hawaii for what may be his last chance to visit with his Toot.
A year ago, I too was making my last trip to visit my own grandmother, who died in late November at the age of 92. I like to think she would have enthusiastically embraced Obama's candidacy, although (who knows?) she might have been worried about some of the anti-Israel rumors. But I think she would have seen through them. In the year before she died, I managed to record about four hours of her stories, and over the course of this year, now that I have a little distance, I've slowly been listening to them and transcribing. Last night I transcribed this story, one she rarely told, about a (very!) early civil rights demonstration that she participated in, and it made me think she would have been happy to see this election (sorry if the transcript is a little raw; I haven't had time to edit or fact-check):
Grandma: We had black and white friends all the time, we knew, we had very good friends who were a couple, black and white couple. Now that was rare in those days, very rare to have two, you know, intermarriage. And, uh, they used to feel very comfortable with us, and not always comfortable outside, it was not that easy for them, not easy at all. People would, you know, people were terrible. They looked at them all the time. Listen, I was the first delegate, I mean I was a delegate to the first American Youth Conference on Civil Rights, which was held in Detroit. This was when I was going out with Alvin. About one thousand young people came from all over the United States. And it was the first time that a picket line walked across, it was in Detroit, walked around an entire block with signs and shouting "Black and white unite and fight!" And police came and arrested people and half of the people they arrested were ministers, who weren’t wearing their, you know, their collars, and when we went into a restaurant with two of our black friends and we sat down and, to give an order, and the waiter came back and said, "We don’t serve black people." And of course we got up and left. But going—this will be my last story.
Hilllady: So this was in the thirties?
Grandma: What?
Hilllady: This was in the thirties?
Grandma: I have the article about it, so I have to look it up. [sigh] Because they had a big story in the Times about this picket line in Detroit. Thirty, no, yeah I guess it had to be the thirties, I was married in ’39. In the thirties—I was about 15, so it had to have been about '35, maybe. Yeah. No. I don’t know. Anyhow, I was chosen as the delegate. And the organization that chose it, we had, I think it was the something Society Against War and Fascism, something like, one of these groups, and I was chosen. I was very active. And they gave me a certain amount of money to go to Detroit and get a hotel and all that. So Alvin said, look, for that amount of money, I can drive you to Detroit. Oh, I said, that’s great. So I tell my mother and father that Alvin’s going to drive me. So my mother suddenly got funny and she said, You should have somebody else coming along with you. I said Okay, so I invited my friend Nan, the one who lives in California who’s known me since I’m fourteen. We get into the car, and I’m trying to think, where’s the safest place to put the money, can’t lose the money. So for some reason I got the idea if I put it in my shoe it will be safest. So I put the money in my shoe, inside my shoe, and we drive off, and we’re about halfway to Detroit and we decide that we have to go to the bathroom. We couldn’t find, at that time there weren’t stations all along the way. We see a station that’s just being built, so I said, Let’s stop there, maybe they have a bathroom that they’ve already built. And it was all pebbles, and we went, and sure enough there was a bathroom there, and we went to the bathroom and we came out, and our shoes are all full of pebbles and we all took our shoes off and shook the pebbles out and we got back into the car and we drove on and about 100 miles on I said, Oh my god! I shook the money out of my shoes! This is the truth. I shook the money—we didn’t have a penny between us, that money was enough for all three of us to stay in a hotel. Well we came into Detroit and I immediately, we sent a telegram immediately to whoever it was, the president of the Society Against War and Fascism and I called my parents and they immediately wired money to us, and we had this incredible experience. It was one of, at that time, I really thought I was going to help change the world.
Update: After a little digging, I think the organization my grandmother remembers is the American League Against War and Fascism, which sounds like a communist/interfaith/pacifist group. The timing seems about right. I'll have to do some more rigorous research into the conference. Grandma's then-boyfriend, Alvin, was a communist who later fought in the Spanish Civil War, so that's probably why she was involved. My sense is that Grandma wasn't so much political in those days as she was a romantic.