The Texas Observer

Deidre Rasheed, Democratic field organizer in Harris County, has been having an anxious night. She’s a professional organizer but that doesn’t mean she’s not emotional about the results. Nothing is coming in fast enough. “Pennsylvania!” she yells at 7:40 p.m., as CNN and ABC call the state for Obama. Rasheed volunteered for Obama in Pennslvania, canvassing door-to-door, and she remembers having people say they’re weren’t going to vote for no nigger. The hatred still burns in her mind.

“Girl, how old are you?” says an older woman guarding the gate to the phone room. “Thirty-seven,” Rasheed  says. “You mean you don’t know about hate?” the older woman says, laughing about it. “That hate has always been around.” Maybe she would have to laugh about it after growing up in segregation all those years and now seeing the first African American in history elected president of the United States.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday talking to two community organizers in Houston’s heavily African American Fifth Ward, Bob Lee and David Benson. We went over the history of the Fifth Ward for a while. Then they got to recalling segregation. When Bob was about 6 or 7, in the early 1950s, his mother dressed up and walked from the nightclub she ran on Lyons Avenue — Lee’s Congo Bar—and headed to Armstrong drug store to vote. In those days the white poll watchers set up voting booths in the Fifth Ward, but that didn’t mean everybody could vote. Bob’s mother left him outside to play and when she came out she was crying. She never voted before she died in 1970.

Benson and Lee talked about the terror their parents felt back then, how worried they were if their boys didn’t phone in and let them know where they were. They were matter of fact about it, but still angry. They had lived in terror.

So when they asked me why I wanted to be in the Fifth Ward when Obama wins the election, I choked up. I couldn’t speak. They sat quietly until I pulled myself together.

There’s a celebration going on here now, as well there ought to be. Ohio just went to Obama. It’s all over.

There’s yelling and screaming and applause outside and inside. I don’t believe for a moment that our racial problems are solved with this election. Obama is not a black man, Lee and Benson told me. He is a mix of us all. And he’s where he is because of the efforts of a lot of people before him.

Bob Lee brought up Obama’s grandparents, those white Kansans who raised him and loved him. “We should kiss those grandparents,” he said.

–Michael Berryhill

The under-reported story of this election has been the impact of Barack Obama’s organizational skill. While the Republicans, led by Sarah Palin, sneered at Obama’s background as a community organizer, they should have been a little more respectful. If Obama wins tonight, it won’t be just because George W. Bush has been such a dismal president, or because the economy is in the tank, or because Obama is a better speaker and McCain has been so erratic and his vice presidential choice so lightweight.

If Obama wins, it will be largely because he is a community organizer. No one understands that background better than the African-American community in Houston’s Fifth Ward, the historic black neighborhood roughly north of the Ship Channel and east of State Highway 59. Obama is the first presidential candidate to set up a campaign office in the Fifth Ward.

The Fifth Ward has been organized for a long time, says Bob Lee, a long-time community organizer. In 1944, Lonnie Smith, a Fifth Ward dentist, filed a lawsuit to vote in the Democratic primaries that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland went to Congress on the shoulders of Fifth Ward civic leaders, educators and organizers.

Bob Lee’s younger brother, El Franco Lee, has been Harris County Commissioner for Precinct 1 for twenty years. Franco Lee seldom faces a serious opponent. (He’s running against a Libertarian this year.) In large part this is because Lee provides so many services to the community. His brother Bob has worked ceaselessly with the poor, scrounging up clothes and food and furniture and jobs for those in need. Community organizers work all the time, not just at election time.

During the primaries, Obama came to Houston to meet with El Franco Lee. Al Gore never made it. John Kerry made a phone call but never followed through.

On Sunday, I spent a couple of hours watching the organization in action. Volunteers spent the morning phoning voters in battleground Ohio. By the afternoon they were through with Ohio and moving on to Indiana. It was impossible to tell how many were working, because many were making the calls from home. A busload of volunteers had left for swing-state New Mexico. Another carried 74 people to Ohio.

The field organizer for the Fifth Ward headquarters is Deidre Rasheed, a calm, low-key woman who worked for Kerry’s campaign in 2004. Rasheed said the Kerry campaign gave her handwritten lists of voters to work with. This year, when you make phone calls for Obama, you get a computer printout with the names and phone numbers, and each voter entry has a bar-code label.
Obama personally trained the field organizers at the top levels of the campaign, Rasheed says. “The whole model was organized by Obama himself.”

The top organizers in turn trained the next layers of organizers. Everyone gets the same training. This is a fundamental principle of community organizing and will, thanks to the success of this campaign, be fundamental to political organizing for a long time to come. It carried Obama through the Iowa caucuses and will likely carry him to the White House.

Did Kerry have a trainer to train her? I asked Rasheed.

“No,” she said, rolling her eyes in disbelief. “Kerry wasn’t organized. Obama has a machine.”

–Michael Berryhill