Historic leap over the racial divide

For those like Harris who withstood jailings and beatings and threats to their livelihoods, all because they wanted to vote, the short drive to the polls on Tuesday culminated a lifelong journey from a time that is at once unrecognisable and eerily familiar in southwest Georgia. As they exited the voting booths, some in wheelchairs, others with canes, these foot soldiers of the civil rights movement could not suppress either their jubilation or their astonishment at having voted for an African-American for President.

8220;It8217;s time to reap some of the harvest,8221; Harris, 67, said with a gratified smile.

When Harris arrived at the city gymnasium where she votes, her 80-year-old friend Mamie L Nelson greeted her with a hug. 8220;We marched, we sang and now it8217;s happening,8221; Ms. Nelson said.

Many, like the Rev Horace C Boyd, who is pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, viewed the moment through the prism of biblical prophecy. If Dr King was the movement8217;s Moses, doomed to die without crossing the Jordan, it would fall to Obama to be its Joshua, they said.

8220;King made the statement that he viewed the Promised Land, won8217;t get there, but somebody will get there, and that day has dawned,8221; said Boyd, 81, who pushed his wife in a wheelchair to the polls on Tuesday morning.

It was a day most never imagined that they would live to see. From their vantage point amid the cotton fields and pecan groves of Dougherty County, where the movement for voting rights faced some of its most determined resistance, the country did not seem ready.

Yes, the world had changed in 47 years. At City Hall, the offices once occupied by the segregationist mayor, Asa D Kelley Jr, and the police chief, Laurie Pritchett, are now filled by Mayor Willie Adams and Chief James Younger, both of whom are Black. But much in this Black-majority city of 75,000 seems the same: neighbourhoods remain starkly delineated by race, Blacks are still five times more likely than Whites to live in poverty and the public schools have so resegregated that 9 of every 10 students are Black.

Harris, a retired special education teacher who was jailed three times in 1961 and 1962, was so convinced that Obama could not win White support that she backed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the primaries. 8220;I just didn8217;t feel it was time for a Black man, to be honest,8221; she said. 8220;But the Lord has revealed to me that it is time for a change.8221;

Late Tuesday night, when the networks declared Obama the winner, Harris could not hold back the tears, the emotions of a lifetime released in a flood. She shared a lengthy embrace with friends gathered at the Obama headquarters, and then led the exultant crowd in song.

8220;Glory, glory, hallelujah,8221; she sang. After a prayer, she joined the crowd in chanting, 8220;Yes, we did!8221;

Among the things Harris appreciates about Obama is that even though he was in diapers while she was in jail, he seems to respect what came before. 8220;He8217;s of a different time and place, but he knows whose shoulders he8217;s standing on,8221; she said.

When the movement came to Albany in 1961, fewer than 100 of Dougherty County8217;s 20,000 Black residents were registered to vote, said the Rev Charles M Sherrod, one of the first field workers sent here by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Literacy tests made a mockery of due process 8212; Boyd remembers being asked by a registrar how many bubbles were in a bar of soap and bosses made it clear to Black workers that registration might be incompatible with continued employment.

Lucius Holloway Sr, 76, said he lost his job as a post office custodian after he began registering voters in neighbouring Terrell County. He was shunned by other Blacks who hated him for the trouble he incited. Now Holloway is a member of the county commission, and when he voted for Obama last week he said his pride was overwhelming. 8220;Thank you, Jesus, I lived to see the fruit of my labour,8221; he said.

The Albany movement spread with frenzied abandon after the arrival of Sherrod, and King devoted nearly a year to the effort. The protests became known for the exuberant songs that Harris and others adapted from Negro spirituals. The movement met its match in Albany8217;s recalcitrant White leaders, who filled the jails with demonstrators while avoiding the kind of violence that drew media outrage and federal intervention in other civil rights battlegrounds. The energy gradually drained from the protests, and King moved on to Birmingham, counting Albany as a tactical failure.

Sherrod, 71, who settled in Albany and continues to lead a civil rights group here, argues that the movement succeeded; it simply took time. He felt the weight of that history when he voted last Thursday morning, after receiving radiation treatment for his prostate cancer. 8220;This is what we prayed for, this is what we worked for,8221; he said.