As night fell at NAACP headquarters in Northwest Baltimore Tuesday night, Benjamin Jealous looked forward to a new day.
Amid the phone banks crammed with volunteers, the president and chief executive officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People hoped one would advance further than any before, and pave the way for a new generation.
“Should we wake up tomorrow and find we have a black president, a moment 232 years in the making, since the founding of the United States, and 99 years in the making since the NAACP was formed … has come,” Jealous said. “And finally our children will be able to aspire to lead this country.”
Some of those children gathered outside the headquarters building to release balloons with cards attached. On each card was a wish they hoped the new president, whoever he may be, would carry out.
As the hopes rose into the darkening sky, phones continued to chirp on desks inside the building, the latest of more than 30,000 calls the NAACP’s “Election Day Command Center” had received by late afternoon.
Volunteers tracked turnout, helped voters with registration issues and access to polls, and monitored reports of voting irregularities. Kirk Clay, the organization’s civic engagement director, said that scattered reports of voting problems in Baltimore had been received, but that voter turnout was even greater than expected.
“We didn’t think it’d be as high as this,” he said. “We hoped for a 5 percent increase in some precincts; in some of those precincts it may be as high as 10 percent.”
Though a win by Barack Obama would be a great symbolic victory, Jealous cautioned that the NAACP’s mission remained the same, and might not necessarily be any easier.
“The day he becomes president, he’s no longer the first [African-American to be elected], he’s the 44th [president],” Jealous said. “All the pressures will come to bear on him that would come to bear on any president.”
