Black pride resonates

When it became official, retired Elgin teacher Carolyn O'Neal bowed her head and pumped her fists.

"Yes! Yes! Yes!" she whispered to herself as she watched election-night results from her home. Then her eyes filled with tears.

"It's really happening," she said.

The tears flowed even earlier for Eliza Broadnax, 70. When she saw Barack Obama's name on her ballot, she quietly wept in the privacy of her voting booth at Huff School in Elgin.

"Hallelujah! God is great," she said.

O'Neal and Broadnax, like so many other suburban blacks - especially those who came of age prior to the Civil Rights movement - never thought they'd live to see an African-American man elected president. So when Obama became the nation's first black president-elect Tuesday night, they celebrated with whoops and cheers as well as disbelieving stares. Many saw the night as the fulfillment of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

"Is this happening? Am I dreaming?" asked Pastor Francis Senyah, of St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church in Elgin. "I'm so proud of America to have come this far - overlooking (Obama's) racial background and seeing him just as an American. It's a new generation."

While pride resonates through the African-American community, most are quick to note that many famous and not-so-famous people laid the groundwork for this day. Deirdre Mathis, 41, of Elgin got a text message Tuesday that said, "Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Obama could run. Obama is running so our children could fly."

While they are joyous in their celebration, members of the black community realize that this is merely a step forward on a very long road to racial harmony in America. Discrimination in the pre-Civil Rights era was worse in the South. But there was plenty of it going on here in the Chicago suburbs, too.

As a kid growing up in Elgin in the 1940s, Ernie Broadnax, Eliza's husband, was not allowed to swim in the Wing Park public pool or go to restaurants with his friends.

Richard Sublet, 75, remembers marching through downtown Wheaton in the 1960s to protest banks' refusal to give mortgages to black families who wanted to buy homes in white parts of the city. The Ku Klux Klan routinely vandalized homes of black people who tried to live in white areas across the suburbs.

Having a black man in the White House is not going to eliminate racism, and it's also not going to solve all of the nation's problems.

"The man is not going to be able to part the Red Sea," said Ron O'Neal, Carolyn's husband and an African-American and administrator at Aurora University. "I don't expect to wake up in the morning and think my life is going to be significantly different."

But Obama's election gives suburban blacks a feeling of hope for their children.

"I think the world is going to be far different for our grandchildren now," said Carolyn O'Neal. "They can see what's possible."