Outside Guilford Elementary School in Baltimore on Tuesday, Nannette Mitchell broke down into tears.
Having just voted for Barack Obama, the 62-year-old mother of former mayoral candidate Keiffer Mitchell Jr. and member of the storied civil rights activists Mitchell clan was overcome with emotion.
“They burned a cross on my front lawn in Richmond when I was eight years old after Brown in 1954,” referring to the Supreme Court’s decision mandating school desegregation. “So it’s hard to describe how special this day for those of us that remember how difficult it used be,” said Mitchell, her 6-year-old grandson Jack in tow.
For Mitchell the vote marked a historic moment, a divide between her childhood in Virginia, and the future.
“In my lifetime I’ve been called a Negro, a black, and now an African-American, but today is a day of redemption and hope.”
Across the city, black voters young and old stood outside polling places, posing for pictures, expressing optimism as they cast their vote for the first black president.
“I’m thinking about the older folks who really went through the hard times, what this must mean to them,” said Darnel Shields, a 37-year-old educator waiting outside Eutaw-Marshburn Elementary School in the afternoon. Holding his 1-year-old son Mosiah, Shields said that a black president would offer a positive role model for young black men.
“I think people will have a different perception of black men if Obama is president.”
Election judge Sonny Moses, working at the McCullough Homes polling station, said it wasn’t the line of people several blocks long waiting in the morning for the polls to open that impressed him.
“The thing that’s different is all the young people I’ve seen,” Moses said. “I’ve been working at polls for 25 years and I’ve never seen so many first-time voters and young voters before who are willing to stand in line to be counted. It’s really a good thing.”
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