A slave’s daughter talks about Obama’s victory
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- November
- 5
Along a rural highway in central Texas sits a small white house with some cows grazing out back and a wheelchair ramp leading to the front screen door. Inside that house lives Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a slave. No one in her family, least of all Jones, thought she would live long enough to vote for the man who is to become the first black president.Jones is the living link between the time when black men were owned as property and the time when a black man has been elected president of the United States.
She wears a pink gown and sits in a worn recliner. Thick glasses magnify her rheumy eyes — eyes that have witnessed two world wars, a great depression, and the arrival of jazz, television and antibiotics. Born in 1899, Jones has lived through a half-century of institutional segregation and a second half-century of attempts to erase that legacy.
“The white is over everything,” she says. “I never thought the colored would rise up” and accomplish this.
She thinks the election of President Barack Obama is “a blessing.”
More “here.”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96581933
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on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 9:44 am by Noreen O'Donnell.
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