"Everybody Wants a Piece of Me" Heart; Obama Inauguration

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Obama Rides through History on Pennsylvania Avenue
Ghosts of Pennsylvania Avenue

The Washington road has been the scene of hate, oppression, possibility and progress. Obama will make the trek past dramatic civil-rights landmarks, and won't stop until he reaches the White House.


By Faye Fiore
10:47 AM PST, January 19, 2009
REPORTING FROM WASHINGTON -- When Barack Obama takes his triumphant ride along Pennsylvania Avenue Tuesday, he will retrace the path of Ku Klux Klan marches and roll past the ghosts of hotels and movie theaters that used to turn away people like him.


This historic stretch, book-ended by the Capitol on one end and the White House on the other, has witnessed many of the milestones that made an Obama presidency possible. The Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were signed here.

But it's doubtful that even a Harvard-educated wonder can get his arms around the scope of the civil-rights drama that has played out on this 1.2-mile slice of real estate.

There are places more famous for their scars -- Selma, Birmingham -- but none captures the sweep of the story the way Pennsylvania Avenue does, where laws were passed to enslave people and laws were passed to free them, and at least a dozen of Obama's predecessors would sooner have considered him a piece of property than a peer.

Nearly every president has made this ceremonial trek since Thomas Jefferson did it on horseback. But never has the setting been as connected to the nation's shame as much as its glory.

"That juxtaposition is the way I always think of Pennsylvania Avenue -- a place of great possibility and of great evil," said Lonnie Bunch, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. "It is a mirror of change in America."

Obama and his family will ride up the promenade in an armored 2009 black Cadillac limo after he takes the oath of office on Capitol steps built by slaves.

At 3rd Street, the motorcade will pass what used to be the St. Charles Hotel, a popular stop in the early 1800s where slaves were kept in underground cells while their owners enjoyed the luxuries upstairs; reimbursement was guaranteed if any escaped.

"That hotel became a favorite of black patrons after the Civil War," said Charles Cobb, an author and professor of Africana studies at Brown University.

At 4th Street, a block from the hotel that made sure no slave escaped, the new president will pass what used to be the American Colonization Society Hall, founded in 1816 to return emancipated blacks to Africa, an effort fueled in part by whites who believed there was no place in America for a free black community.

Tension between races was inborn for a democracy founded on a contradiction -- 12 of the early presidents were slave holders, eight while in the White House.

From the start, the heart of the nation's capital -- a broad avenue designed by Pierre L'Enfant that was a dusty mess until it became the town's first paved street -- was a place of mixed signals. Some freed blacks operated successful businesses while their brethren continued to be sold off in chains.

While in the White House, President Jackson kept 150 house and field slaves back on his Tennessee farm. It was under his nose one night in 1835, at 6th and Pennsylvania, that a white mob ransacked the Epicurean Eating House and tried to lynch its black owner, a man named Beverly Snow.

Today, just a few doors down, an elegant pink building with twin spires stands as a monument to the civil-rights struggle: The National Council of Negro Women headquarters, purchased with the help of Oprah Winfrey six years ago, is the only black-owned property on this famous stretch.

Inside, Dorothy Height, 96, a lifelong activist and president emeritus of the civil-rights advocacy group, keeps an office.

"No inaugurated president will leave the Capitol to go to his house without passing our house," she likes to say. Known for her trademark hats -- one day last week ti was dusty blue with a big rhinestone-studded bow -- she was preparing to attend a swearing-in ceremony she did not think she would live to see.

"Barack Obama presents a strong symbol of what we have achieved under the hardest conditions," said Height, who won a scholarship to Barnard College as a young woman but was denied admission because of her skin color.

The symbolism is even bolder considering the building is steps from 7th and Pennsylvania, where a teeming market of slaves, penned up in filth and misery awaiting sale, was a lucrative enterprise.

Obama will be halfway to the White House when he passes it. There is little to mark that it even existed. But, according to Bunch, a visiting British writer once noted that the business going on in the Capitol was drowned out by the anguished wails of families being separated and sold.

"We forget, but slavery was so embedded into the American system, it shouldn't be a surprise that slaves were traded within the shadow of the Capitol," Bunch explained.

Slavery was outlawed by 1865, but the inequality persisted. Blacks were barred from jobs, hotel rooms, toilets and restaurant counters. Pennsylvania Avenue led the nation in a dance: two steps forward and one step back.

Franklin Roosevelt opened the war-industry jobs to blacks after he was threatened with a massive march on Washington. Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal workplace to appease his offended wife.

And somewhere along this street, a sailor named Sam Harmon, stationed in Virginia during World War II, was denied admittance to a movie theater when the clerk saw the hand that reached for the ticket was black. He walked the streets that night in tears.

"As you move into the '50s and '60s, Pennsylvania Avenue is reflective of a segregated America," Cobb said. "Black people cooked in the restaurants that served the capital but couldn't eat in them."

For nearly 100 years after slavery was outlawed, Pennsylvania Avenue did little to advance justice. Then in 1964, President Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination in hotels, restaurants and department stores. Martin Luther King Jr. stood over his shoulder at the White House.

Four years later, smoke could be seen rising from Pennsylvania at 7th Street when riots broke out as word reached black neighborhoods north of downtown that King had been assassinated.

At 10th Street, Obama will pass within a block of Ford's Theater, where Lincoln was shot by actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865. As if in a flurry to honor his legacy, Congress would adopt the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments outlawing slavery, making former slaves citizens and giving black men the right to vote.

One result: Black businessman James Wormley opened the capital's first integrated hotel at 15th and Pennsylvania, a block from the White House.

Obama's ceremonial journey will end at the nation's most famous address -- 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. For decades, the windows offered a view of slaves servicing the elegant homes on Lafayette Square.

Today, in that same spot, record crowds will gather -- braving confounding security, epic bathroom lines and biting cold -- to watch Pennsylvania Avenue dance another step forward.

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Everybody wants a piece of me, God!
For a short time, I even get to be a "Rock Star"...
The personal is always political, Lord.
It takes tremendous courage to endure this kind of pressure from people,
but I'm good!
I'm okay!

Help me to help them Get It, God...
It's all about sharing!


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Hope Hearts; Road to the Inauguration

AN AMERICAN MOMENT: ROAD TO THE INAUGURATION
A narrative of racism and hope

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Bob Dunn's stories of poverty, taunts, war and elections weave through 80 years of American history. The climax, for him, was Obama's historic rise. 'It is almost as though I am on air.'


By PETER H. KING
peter.king@latimes.com

January 17, 2009
Reporting from Willingboro, N.J. -- He sat at the kitchen table and told his stories -- 80 years of American history -- a child of the segregated South, just four generations removed from slavery, who went on to serve in the U.S. Army as a lieutenant colonel assigned to the Pentagon. They cover a long arc, Bob Dunn's stories do.

The stories drift back to his mother, who was strapped into a plow harness because the family could not afford a mule, through dark days of threats and taunts and learning to hold his tongue in the company of whites, ever on alert, and finally forward to election night when he sat in this same room and watched on television as Barack Obama was elected president, and felt almost as if he had floated away from his trim body.

Dunn told his stories in no particular order, apologizing for gaps in the narrative: "I put it out of my mind so much that I can't go from one to another. I go around and around."


There was the incident back in his hometown of Kinston, N.C. He was 13 years old, working as a delivery boy. One of his friends was a white boy named Sammy Manning, who worked in the same grocery store.

Late on a Saturday night, he and Sammy pulled out curved butcher knives and playfully began to reenact a sword fight from an Errol Flynn film. Dunn's knife nicked the other boy on the ribs, just enough to draw blood. Sammy slugged him and ran for home:

I had been there long enough to know that he is not going home to be bandaged. He is going home to spread the word that he got cut. . . . So I said, what is he going to do? And what are they going to do? Of course, they were lynching black people back then.

Sure enough, in about 15 minutes, Sammy showed up with his mother and a whole crowd of people, out there in front of the building, and I heard his mother say, "Where's that nigger that cut my Sammy?"

Oh my God. I was going to go back over there and explain to her that it was an accident. Well, that was the most stupid thing I did because --"There he is! Right there!" -- they took off after me. And I took off running, and I was a real good runner at the time.

And it was raining that night. And I cut into a little alley where there were houses and dived under a house. They went up and down trying to figure out which way I went.

I remember there was a dog under the house . . . and he was growling and so forth. But I would prefer avoiding that dog than I would all those people -- because I knew what they wanted to do to me.

He paused, seeing it all again.



"This happened," Dunn said. "I am telling you exactly. It did happen."

Now he was a young officer, stationed down in Alabama. These were the earliest days of the civil rights movement and the state was ferociously determined to resist the integration that had been forced on the military. His fellow soldiers for the most part treated him with little respect, refusing to follow such common-sense commands as stop playing with live ammo.

But his oldest daughter -- Dora, now 55 and listening from the kitchen -- had it even harder, he said. She was the only black in her high school.

The teachers were the worst ones, against any integration. They jumped on her. The instructors would get up and start teaching this thing about the black people were happiest when they were slaves because slave owners took good care of them. Of course, she immediately would call the teachers: "That's not right."

"Well, how dare you!"

So she'd be sent out of the class. Each night that she came home she wanted to stop, to find someplace else. And I would spend each night talking to her, talking about "how important it is for you to continue what you are doing. You are the first black person to be down there, but you certainly won't be the last. And you have got to be strong."

And sometimes I regret doing that now because she was so young. But I told her that "regardless of what the situation, you have got to do it -- for us, for black people in general, you have just got to do it. You cannot let them win."


And now, he was in Kinston again, learning the family story from his preacher father and his mother, who made sure all nine of her children finished high school, with six of them scraping their way through college. He had been told, for instance, about a great-grandmother who, daughter of a slave, had inherited enough of a master's blood to look white -- but still was treated as a black. Dunn worked as a young waiter in a fine restaurant, because being served by meek-mannered blacks was perceived by whites as a status symbol, a remnant of antebellum privilege. Then he found work as a bellhop at Kinston's hotel. This was during World War II and the hotel was filled mostly with hard-drinking Marines.

I remember once they were half-drunk, over at the sixth floor of the hotel. And to scare me they grabbed me by the legs and put me out the window. And they were threatening, "Should we throw him out or pull him in?" And they didn't, and don't think they intended to. But they could easily have dropped me because they were drinking and so forth.

But it was the type of thing that they would do at the time. And that was something you had to learn to put up with. When they pulled me back in they gave me a big tip and all that. But you know, you still say, Well, maybe one of these days I'll be beyond this.

And then he was in Vietnam, dangling from an airplane, this time as a matter of duty -- looking for jungle to defoliate and deprive the enemy of cover. He went on to serve in the Pentagon, vetting regulation reports. He built a second career with the Urban League. He outlived his siblings.

Dunn -- along with his wife, Faye, who sat in another room as he told his stories -- raised four daughters and a son, teaching them to not see skin color and to resist any impulse for hatred. Dunn watched a lot of history together with his daughter Dora. She remembered how he had screamed in anger at the television in 1957 when a black girl trying to attend school was spit upon, and how he shouted in exultation as Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I have a dream" speech.

But there was no shouting this year as election night coverage reached its historical climax. A quiet fell over the room. Dunn had watched every campaign moment through the primaries, rooting for Obama, and now he felt as he often did after hearing a particular piece of classical music, Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 8.

"It is almost as though I am on air," Dunn said, straining to explain the out-of-body reverie. "Mahler affects me that way. And I felt the same when I got the announcement that Obama had won. . . . I don't know what I was thinking, but I felt that I was off the ground.



" 'I am there,' " he remembered telling himself. "I am there. And I have witnessed this."

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All hearts of Hope
have the intention of the human hand working miracles in them.

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