Pastor's Page for Nov. 2, 2008: An Historic Election

In two days, the most historic election ever in this country will take place.

It is as though I can hear our ancestors stirring, sitting on the edges of their heavenly berths, looking down, and saying, “so be it.”

So be it that we struggled so hard. So be it that we would not give up, not when they threatened us, not when they killed our babies, not when they gave us bogus literacy and citizenship tests. So be it.

So be it that we dared to learn to read and write and get to know for ourselves what our rights were. So be it that we didn’t listen to people who told us we were too stupid, too dumb, to learn anything. We did it. We taught ourselves. And it has finally paid off.

So be it that we got to know the Lord Jesus for ourselves, and got to know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we were entitled to salvation while we were yet alive, and so be it that we fought hard so that our children and their children and their children ….would know salvation and be free.

So be it that God helped Harriet Tubman lead slaves to freedom, helped Mary McLeod Bethune build a school, helped Ida B Wells Barnett fight for anti-lynching legislation, helped Mamie Till make the world look at what a racist world did to her son.

Power conceded nothing without a struggle, never has and never will, but so be it that we held onto God’s unchanging hand because we had a goal … that our people would have all the rights that everybody else had.

We don’t mind that we had to fight so that our children would have a chance at a good education. We don’t mind that not only did we have to fight, but we had to fight every day of our natural lives to push through the resistance. Oh, yes, so be it, this election.

The ancestors, our ancestors, have to be celebrating. It doesn’t much matter who wins this election, not to them. What matters is that they are seeing scores of black people go to the polls, some for the first time in their lives (one woman, 103 years old, is voting for the first time in this election!). That makes the beatings, the murders, the chicanery all worth it.

They have to be celebrating because a generation of African American children are seeing their own people own their right to vote. They are celebrating because generations of African Americans have continued to push against the wall called racism, a wall that threatened to keep a people enclosed and shut off from opportunities forever.

My mother used to pat her foot when an African American was the “first” to do something. I declare I can see her foot patting and can feel the earth shaking with the joy that foot is communicating. But all of our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins … are celebrating.

This has to be as momentous as was the moment when the slaves were waiting for January 1, 1863, to dawn, signaling that they were free. Just to see an African American, whose theme was “oh yes we can!” get this far, is more than any of us expected to see in our life time. The sky is the limit now; little black boys and little black girls are feeling like they really can do anything, like any door they want to open, they can. Young African American men and women in college are no longer stifling the dream they’ve had to be president of the United States. Nobody will think it beyond possibility now.

Yes, the ancestors are celebrating.
And so am I.
Whatever the outcome Tuesday, do not desecrate the joy by not voting. Whomever you vote for, vote. Do it because too many died and sacrificed for us to be able to exercise that right we have as American citizens. Do it because we have “come over a way that with tears has been watered.”

Do it because we owe our ancestors that much.

Pastor Smith