Obama won North Carolina. That's big. The win is important, to different people, for different reasons.
The Obama campaign has taken pains to distance itself from comparisons to other African American presidential campaigns of the past, and for good reason: Obama's appeal to white voters is unprecedented, and pigeonholing him as the "black" candidate, when his message is essentially post-racial politics, is counterproductive in this race. But to the black electorate in North Carolina, his win here means something extra. To the black folks in NC – and in Durham, specifically – Obama's win here is a vindication of the kind of work they've done here for a century.
While Durham has been largely overlooked by white culture, except as the home of the private Duke University, it has a unique historical place in the culture of African Americans. Once downtown Durham's Parrish Street was known as the Black Wall Street, owing to the number of black-owned businesses there. In the bad old days of Jim Crow and racial segregation, Parrish Street was about the only place the nascent black middle class could invest their money, get a loan, or take out insurance. From the end of Reconstruction in the late 1800s to the 1940s, black professionals congregated here, did business here, and made money here. It was just around the corner from Main Street, where their white counterparts did much the same. The two even occasionally crossed the street, when necessary for business. That makes Durham a unique place to tell the story of black entrepreneurship and the growth of the black middle class.
Mechanics and Farmers Bank and the People's Security Insurance Company were both founded here. Both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois hailed Durham's thriving Hayti (pronounced HAY-tai) residential district and Parrish Street as a national model for the black middle class. Two generations later so did Martin Luther King, Jr. These businesses navigated through turbulent times, race riots, civil disobedience, Jim Crow, and worse, providing valuable services to the black community – services no white business was willing to provide.
Parrish Street was an ironic victim of desegregation. Like the Negro Baseball Leagues, when the color barriers were broken in the 1960s white businesses started to see the black community as a business resource and lured away much of their clientele, depriving the street of its previous client base. "Progressive" development in the 1960s and 1970s killed off what remained, running the Durham Freeway through the cultural heart of the Hayti neighborhood, while Northgate Mall lured consumers of all races away from the downtown commercial district. Misguided urban planning encircled downtown with a confusing one-way loop road in the 1960s, and did away with the majority of parking spaces. By 1980, Parrish Street was a ghost town. Today, it is a historic district, complete with cafes and art galleries. Woolworth's, site of the famous 1960s sit-ins, will be the site of where the historical markers will be placed later this year.
That Obama made an unofficial pilgrimage to Parrish Street, the day before the vital North Carolina Primary, is telling, even if it was not particularly noteworthy. He shook some hands at the Blue Coffee Café, bought everyone some pound cake, and shook some more hands before he left. Little was made of the event by the media, but it carried a deep meaning to the black community in Durham. While Obama makes a strong case for being a post-racial candidate, he is also very much a black candidate that the black community can solidly support – not just because of the color of his skin, but because of the content of his character. There is a reason that Durham boasted the highest margin of victory -- and the highest turn-out rate -- of any county in the state. Folks were motivated.
While the campaign takes great pains to ensure the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural nature of Obama's supporters is publicly shown, to the black folks in Durham he represents a successful black professional who has risen to the highest ranks of power due to his skills and intelligence. There was no affirmative action program that won him his Senate seat, and there was no quota that propelled him to frontrunner status in the Presidential primaries. He got there on his own merits, using an easy wit, a keen intelligence, and running on the very non-radical social values that the growing black middle class prefers. Despite his funny name and Yankee accent, as a candidate he falls well within their comfort zone.
To them, he signifies America's willingness to accept the best and the brightest of the African American community as worthy of leadership of the Free World. A young black man lingering after he departs explains: "He's post-civil rights. The movement was great, and vital, but there is too much of black politics wrapped up in the battles of the past, and not enough about the struggles of the future. Obama represents that future without the baggage of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton."
Obama's presence on Parrish Street is a vindication of all of those who not only sat-in and marched, but educated themselves, invested, promoted, sold and saved on Parrish Street. If inequities in wealth are at the root of black poverty, here, in Durham, without government handouts or special programs, wealth was once created by black people, for black people, on their own merits and their own terms. Not only is Obama the Dream realized, but he is the Promise of America fulfilled. His victory is their victory.
A few claim that Hillary Clinton is just as interested in seeing a prosperous black middle class, but after the apparent race-baiting, the Rev. Wright fiasco, and the "code words" Hillary is thought to have used in the Pennsylvania primary, there are very few blacks who vocally support her now. Should she manage to take the Democratic nomination she is unlikely to win the support and turnout among blacks in North Carolina, or elsewhere in the South, effectively conceding the region to McCain. There is some hand-wringing over that, but one young woman sums up the feeling: "She burned that bridge, and then pissed in the ashes. I'll stay home that day. I'll be sad that McCain won, but I'll be sadder that if a man like Obama can't be president in America, no black person can."