Older African-Americans in awe but on edge

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile • E-mail

SEATTLE - Color Henry McGee Jr. amazed.

A professor of law for 40 years who has spent a lifetime on the cutting edge of efforts to integrate the African-American community into mainstream U.S. society, McGee, 75, has seen lots of progress. But he never dared to believe he would see a black person in the White House.

“I wouldn’t have even thought of it and I’m pretty imaginative,” he said of the prospect that Sen. Barack Obama, with a substantial lead in many national polls and in key battleground states, could be elected president. “There was totally a situation of racial apartheid in the United States when I graduated from college. Just in one person’s lifetime … the country has traveled centuries.”

Of all the elements of American society that have celebrated Obama’s candidacy, it is a profoundly poignant moment for older African-Americans, regardless of whether they agree with the Illinois senator’s politics. But for many of them, the biggest emotion will remain disbelief unless and until they see Obama take the oath of office.

“I really do not believe what is going on,” said Beverly J. Kelly, 77. “Three-hundred years ago we were not even a human being. We were like a cow or something that could be bought and sold.”

“I didn’t think it would ever be possible, but all you can do is hope and pray,” echoed John Kelsie, 88, a 52-year member of Seattle’s storied Mount Zion Baptist Church.

McGee, Kelly and Kelsie all live in Washington state’s King County, whose name honors slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. While the county seat of Seattle was noted for racial tolerance in the days when African-Americans were a small minority, racism became more pronounced in the city as the black population grew rapidly during World War II when area defense industries clamored for more workers.

The city was a hotbed of civil rights work during the ’60s and ’70s, with activists making major strides toward integration and acceptance of African-Americans in schools, trade unions and social clubs. Seattle elected a black mayor in 1989 and King County’s top elected official today is an African-American.

A sense of wonder
Still, a sense of wonder at Obama’s rendezvous with history remains common among members of the African-American community who were born when lynching was still common in the South, when Major League Baseball, the U.S. armed forces and the vast majority of American public schools were segregated. They and fellow members of their generation were already teens and adults by the time of the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision and Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, which occurred five years before Obama was born. Many of them were parents before they saw African-Americans serve on the Supreme Court and in the Cabinet, and grandparents long before the nation had its first black governor in 1990.

Blogging the election For three days surrounding the 2008 election, msnbc.com reporters blogged on the reactions of African-Americans and others in the Bronx, N.Y., Nashville, Tenn. and Seattle as NBC News correspondents reported from elsewhere. Click here to read the coverage and readers' response.

McGee has broken plenty of race barriers himself in a career that has taken him around the globe to research, write and teach. He was the first African-American president of a dorm at Northwestern University and the first to win election to the student governing board. He was one of the first black professors to win tenure at UCLA, where he taught law for 25 years before leaving in 1994, and the first at Seattle University, where he currently teaches classes on environmental and housing law. Along the way, he attained degrees from Northwestern, DePaul and Columbia, won two Fulbright fellowships and became an accomplished violinist who still plays with the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra.

“I was always in that situation of being at the edge of the frontier between African-American society and mainstream America,” McGee said. Although he began his professional life as a prosecutor and then private attorney in his native Chicago, he felt a call to public service and the academic world during what he refers to as the “integration mania” of the late 1960s and early ’70s. In a sense, he was following in the footsteps of his father, who as Chicago postmaster was the first African-American to run a major U.S. postal facility.

Shifting directions
McGee helped register voters in Mississippi, then ran legal outreach and research programs through the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity and University of Chicago Law School.

“It was in the interests of the country to racially integrate and I felt an obligation to do it, if it could be done,” he said. “The next phase in racial integration was for white students to have black teachers.” So McGee, who “never had a black teacher in my life,” began his four decades behind the lectern, first at Ohio State University, then in the UCLA post.

Now in his 15th year on the Seattle University faculty, McGee shows no signs of slowing down. His pleasant but pointed questioning of students about their cases keeps them on their toes in the classroom. And his high energy keeps them literally running through the streets of Seattle to stay up with him on field trips to affordable housing projects and other institutions related to their studies.

MORE FROM RACE AND THE ELECTION

Race and the election Section Front

Historians' first draft on Obama What is the impact of Obama candidacy? Hope or hype: Election fervor in Harlem Race fear vs. money anxiety at play in election Obama tells Stewart he could ‘Bradley’ himself McCain: Racism will barely affect election What is the future of race-based districts? Obama tackles race divide in major speech Race and the election Section Front   Add Race and the election headlines to your news reader: