JOHNSON: Views vary, but agree: Change has been made

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published November 5, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Photo by Judy Dehaas / The Rocky

As Barack Obama is projected as the winner of the presidential race Tuesday night over Republican John McCain, the celebration gets rolling at Brother Jeff's.

Photo by Judy Dehaas / The Rocky

Greg Smith, a campaign staffer for Barack Obama, sheds tears of joy as he watches election returns indicating a triumph for the Democratic presidential candidate at a victory party for the Illinois senator at Brother Jeff's Cultural Center in northeast Denver.

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In the end, I learned, it was not just about race. For most black voters, there was quite a bit more to it.

I know, of course, that virtually every black person who cast a vote on Tuesday voted for Barack Obama. Pundits likely will be talking about this for months.

Even so, come with me on this journey through Five Points, Park Hill and points farther northeast in Denver where black people live and hear their stories.

Perhaps, like me, you will learn something. What I learned is that it isn't just that Obama is black. What I heard from black voters is that they supported him because he's qualified and he's inspiring and he has good ideas and they believe he is the best candidate. That he happens to be black just makes it that much sweeter.

If you are of a mind to dismiss it all and say it's only about race, that is OK, too.

Tuesday morning broke bright and sunny, a brisk, chilling wind whipping up and down Welton Street. In a second-floor office in Five Points Plaza, a who's who of black Colorado politicians have already gathered, their sole task being to get the elderly and infirm to the polls.

On the north wall of the office is taped a list of some 25 people who are in need of a ride.

Former Denver City Councilwoman Happy Haynes is feverishly working the phones, being fed names and numbers by her mother, Anna Jo.

Working the phones alongside her are state Senate President Peter Groff, Assistant House Majority Leader Terrance Carroll, Rep. Rosemary Marshall and former state Sen. Penfield Tate. Each rattles off proper precinct numbers from memory.

Seated along the walls are the men and women who have volunteered to drive voters to the polls. Darrell Nulan, a 62-year-old Denver attorney, is on his way to pick up an elderly couple in Civic Center Park West. He invites me along.

He pulls his black Lexus sedan in front of a large home at 26th Avenue and Monroe Street. Della Matthews is standing at the front door, awaiting our arrival.

She is 83. Her husband, Georges, an 88-year-old Army veteran who stormed the beaches at Normandy, emerges from the home slowly, balancing himself on a walker. He is dressed in blue jeans, a blue striped shirt and dark blue sweater. He is still in his house slippers.

"I wasn't able to get shoes on his feet this morning, they are so swollen," Della Matthews explains.

They have lived in this patch of Denver for 57 years now, she said, holding the two mail-in ballots they received more than a month ago.

Yes, she said, they could have simply mailed them, but they decided this year they wanted to participate on Election Day.

Barrett Elementary School, their precinct, is but two blocks away. She helps Georges from the car and they walk slowly into the school to put their ballots inside the red box.

"This is history," Della Matthews, a teacher for 27 years in Denver schools, whispered.

They lick their ballots to seal them and slide them into the box. Georges, who struggles to speak, turns and smiles broadly.

"History," he says softly.

Darrell Nulan makes the short drive back to the couple's home, helps each from the car and makes the slow walk back with Georges to the front door. It closes.

"I am so glad I was able to help this couple," he said, eyes moist.

There are other stops to make.

To understand why Louise Ellis repeats, "I'm so glad," over and over while staring down at the newspaper on her kitchen table requires knowing a little about her life.

She is a tiny woman, which is something you notice the minute she finally manages to rise to her feet to greet you.

She is sitting where she always does, against the south-facing wall of her kitchen where the telephone hangs at head height. Her hair is completely white, most of it done in a long braid that rings her head like a crown.

She has lived in this Milwaukee Street house since the early 1950s, when she was the first black person to move onto the block, a home she was forced to pay for in cash after neighbors secretly met with local bankers and warned them that they had better not give her a loan.

She has raised more children than she can remember, not one of them her own. For decades, off and on, Louise Ellis did what she calls "day work," or being a "domestic" in the employ of wealthy white Denver families.

Leaning her head back against the kitchen wall, shifting the clear-plastic oxygen tube that runs from the floor to her nose, she marvels at how the world has changed, and that she is still here to witness it.

Louise Ellis is 94 years old.

"Oh, you know who I voted for," she spits in mock disgust. "How dare you ask me such a question," she adds before breaking into a wide sweet smile.

The daughter and granddaughter of bootleggers - "I am not ashamed" - she first came to Denver at age 8 "in a covered wagon." She remembers going to City Park as a child and being told she could stand only on the pathways and not play with the white children on the playground.

"I played right along with them," she remembers. "It was as stupid a rule then as it would be now."

She took her first day job at age 12, making $25 a week, good money at the time.

"I told them I was 15, but they would have taken me if I told them I was 2," Louise Ellis said. "I have been working all my life."

She remembers her first presidential vote. It was for Franklin D. Roosevelt, "the last American president that was worth a damn."

She never believed she would ever be allowed to vote for a man who looked like her, she said. Oh, there was the time when blacks first got the right to vote. She briefly entertained such a thought, she said. It soon went away.

It has been only two months since she began believing Barack Obama could be the one, she said. He did not try to scare her, but, rather, told her of a vision for the country.

And then, her mail-in ballot arrived.

"Now I'm getting closer to believing," she remembers thinking that day, of how she opened the envelope and saw the candidate's name.

"I still didn't want to believe," Louise Ellis said. "But then that feeling started going up and down my spine. Do you know that feeling? And then, I voted for him. It makes me feel - man, it is exhilarating.

"I went to bed one night, woke up and here it is. I am so glad."

Francisco Subiadur believes he has found a small slice of heaven.

Each elderly person he leads to the polls inside Zion Senior Center at 33rd Avenue and Elm Street he guides gently by the arm, finishing up with a broad smile and an offer to be of any help that he can.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience from the inside what a tremendous change this is," he explains, while waiting on the next voter.

He is 61, having arrived here 28 years ago from Cuba during the Mariel boat lift. He settled immediately in Denver where his mother also still lives.

"The community and my heart pushed me in the same way to be here today," he said. "I am so grateful to be here in this country that I do whatever I can to give back in return."

He learned English here, went to college and became an emergency medical technician. Tuesday was his first election. He wanted to give back, he said.

"We people from Latin America were always told that if you come here, you can kick a rock and there would be a diamond under it. I kicked so many rocks that I don't have a toe anymore," Francisco Subiadur said.

"There was so much freedom here that you can get lost in it. Some of my friends did. I learned from them that you have to be careful to avoid getting lost.

"I discovered helping people and volunteering, which gets in your blood like a drug. You can't get it out of your system," he said, ushering yet another elderly person to a voting station.

Stanley Stewart is standing where he long has, behind his barber chair at the House of Hair at 22nd Avenue and Kearney Street in Park Hill.

Stan is the neighborhood sage. He cuts hair of the famous and the unknown. You pull out a notebook, and he virtually clams up. You have to wait.

The news channels are always on at this time of year, so you wait. Pundits are prattling on when Stan Stewart finally calls you over.

"A lot of my guys," he says half-conspiratorily, "believe (Obama's election) is a reality, that it is sanctioned by God."

God, I repeat.

"I don't go that far," he says, working over a customer's head as we speak. "I can't.

"Whether the man was black or not, I just wanted someone who would be good for the country. I believe Obama is that guy. He could be green if he fits that definition. I don't care what color the president is as long as he brings something to the table."

Nicole Melons was back.

She had been my barber for nearly a decade before moving to Mississippi a year ago. She was standing a chair over from Stan.

"I had two first-time voters in my chair," she recounted. "One was 28 and the other was 56. They were both regretful (at not having voted before), but glad to be alive to get to vote today. It was all because of Barack."

The 56-year-old woman had brought her 108-year-old mother. They were all going to vote on Election Day together, first stopping to get their hair done.

"Personally," Nicole Melons, 34, said, "I was shocked. I've been voting since I was 18. My father would have had my head if I hadn't.

"They just weren't interested in voting before, didn't believe their vote mattered."

I asked about the 108-year-old woman.

"She was the mother of the 56-year-old," Nicole Melons said. "She was so elated, not just because she could vote, but for whom she could vote for today."

And then Nicole Melons said what I heard more than a dozen times on Tuesday:

"Look, I'm a single mom. I don't care what color this man is, I just want the job done. I don't see black today. I just see right.

"Those two women today, they hurt my feelings. I actually teared up. How do you not vote? If it took Obama to bring them out, maybe that is OK. But vote every year.

"Four years from now, I want them to care again."

Even - and this is the part the pundits forget when it comes to black folks - if he or she is green. As long as they bring the goods to the table.

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763

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