Here is more information on Obama’s impending inauguration.
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Anticipation on a City Block
Residents of one Washington block, where two churches for decades symbolized the nation’s racial divide, come together to open their doors on Inauguration Day.
In Bipartisan Appeal, Obama Praises McCain
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
At a dinner for John McCain, Barack Obama praised his former rival for seeking common political ground.
Hot Debate Gives Way To Embrace Of Obama
By SHAILA DEWAN
The Celeste family was divided during the campaign, but they are attending the Obama inauguration together.
Readers’ Album
Photos from NYTimes.com readers. Send your pictures to pix@nyt.com.
Multimedia Features
Capital Visitors’ Guide
More on the Inauguration
Obama leads by example, volunteering and visiting wounded soldiers on MLK Day.
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VIDEO SHORT: ‘BARACK OBAMA AND THE DREAM’:
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Roselle
Timothy Ivy for The New York Times
DENIED Josephine Taylor Evans, who wanted to teach.
Timothy Ivy for The New York Times
WITNESS Dinah White, who recalled her uncle’s lynching.
HOW do you measure the distance traveled by a nation that once believed one race of humans should hold dominion over another?
In the weeks since the election of Barack Obama, the members of the Second Baptist Church here — where the news was greeted, as it was at so many other African-American churches, with a mixture of joy and astonishment — have been assembling an answer to that question, one story at a time.
“Each story just brought me to tears,” said the Rev. James E. Moore, 56, the pastor, who grew up in Second Baptist, the oldest African-American church in town, a pristine, gray-shingled building that has occupied the same corner since 1890. “It’s given us a very deep appreciation of what our progenitors have gone through.”
The Sunday after the election, Mr. Moore gave his blessing to an idea proposed by Shauna Jamieson Carty, 37, a church member who had worked as a newspaper reporter before she became a full-time mother. She wanted to interview some of the 400 other members about what had just happened. He had one suggestion: Start with the oldest, who had seen the most.
Events have moved so quickly since November that the historic dimensions of Mr. Obama’s victory have sometimes seemed overshadowed by the news of the moment: economic collapse at home, war abroad. Not here, though. Not among the church members whose stories Ms. Carty has been collecting, and has published on the church’s Web site and in a series of weekly pamphlets.
“I had no idea there would be such powerful stories,” Ms. Carty said.
Most of the members had an answer like Dinah White’s when asked when they thought the day would come that the United States would choose an African-American as its president. “Never, never,” said Ms. White, 88. “The kids today, I look at them and I just shake my head. They just don’t understand.”
To get them to understand — to get everybody to understand — just how much had changed within the span of her life, just how impossible Mr. Obama’s ascent would have been to imagine when she was their age, she told Ms. Carty a story she had never even told her pastor before. It was about what she remembered seeing outside her grandmother’s house in rural South Carolina when she was a girl of 6.
She was playing in the yard when her grandmother suddenly hustled her out of sight, into a hole that had been dug beside the porch. “She said, ‘Come, child, come hurry up and hide now, take your brother and don’t make a sound,’ ” Ms. White said, recalling her grandmother’s warning on the day the men came looking for her Uncle Charlie, a story she tells haltingly, and with tears. “She gave us each a piece of cornbread — I’ll never forget that.”
As she remembers it, her grandmother’s house had a grove of trees around it, and she peeked out of her hiding place to see what the men had done to her uncle. “They left him there hanging,” she said. “Stripped his clothes off.”
Ms. Carty’s initial intention was to capture the congregants’ reactions to the election itself, but she soon found that there was no way to talk about the present without talking about the past. The stories she heard reached back through the decades: epithets and insults endured; ambitions thwarted; jobs denied; a chasm between the races that sometimes felt unbridgeable. But there was faith, too, a belief that one generation’s struggles would secure another generation’s rewards.
“It was a stressful time to make ends meet, and I gave it up,” said Josephine Taylor Evans, 92, who was born in a one-room sharecropper’s cabin in North Carolina and wanted to become a teacher but could only afford to stay at Fayetteville State College for two years. Her daughter, Delores Whitehead, who also belongs to Second Baptist, earned a master’s degree and had a career as a librarian. Her great-granddaughter is a college student in Florida, and plans to attend the inauguration on Tuesday.
Edith McIntyre, 72, was born in North Carolina and went to Fayetteville State, too, graduating and becoming a teacher. But after she came north and earned a master’s degree, she had to switch careers, to social work. “I couldn’t get a job as a teacher,” she said. “They wouldn’t even interview me. When I would walk in, it was as if I was a nonperson.”
She voted for Mr. Obama at a polling station at the high school here. “I was so interested in the young people who were voting for the first time that I let some of my excitement for myself go and kept looking at them,” she said.
Merlin Bragg, 77, started the campaign season as a Hillary Clinton supporter; her husband of 57 years, Theodore, was for Mr. Obama, and she eventually came around to her husband’s side. “I really didn’t think the country was ready for an African-American president, but they fooled me, for which I’m glad,” she said. “We have really come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. We instill that in our children and our grandchildren — what this really means, what our parents and grandparents have come through to bring us to this point.”
And nobody here had come further than Ms. White, whose uncle was walking to the general store with his head down one day when he bumped into a white couple he hadn’t seen. “He said he jumped up and he fell and his hand touched the lady’s shoe,” Ms. White said, and the man then told him: “‘You’re out of your place, we’ll get you for this,’ and that’s what they killed him for.”
They laid her uncle out in the parlor of her grandmother’s house. “She called us all in there after everything was over, I’ll never forget,” Ms. White said about her grandmother, “and she said, ‘Now, listen — life is for the living, not the dead.’ My father came and she said, ‘Will, take your family and leave here.’ ”
They did leave — going back to Baltimore, where they had been living before her mother came home, as she always preferred, to give birth. Ms. White didn’t return for decades, but her grandmother’s message followed her, about pressing on in the face of death. She still hears her grandmother’s words — “every day,” she said.
Ms. White’s daughter, Linda Glein, plans to be in Washington on Tuesday for the inauguration, and promises to call with reports of what it’s like there, thick in the crowd of the living.
E-mail: jersey@nytimes.com
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 