The community room at the Allendale Apartments was decked out in red, white and blue Thursday night, when Sen. Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.
About a dozen American flags hung on the walls. Red, white and blue balloons floated gently to the ceiling. No fewer than 10 “Obama ’08” signs clung to the walls, in red, white and blue of course.
And then there was the cake for the celebration: white icing, with blue and red letters that read “Obama ’08.” Just the kind of baker’s delight you’d expect at a cake and punch party for a group of black senior citizens who came to hear what, they were convinced, was a history-making speech.
Allendale Apartments was at one time a senior citizens’ high-rise complex. Run by the city of Baltimore, the Allendale is technically no longer a senior citizens’ apartment building, since management now allows younger “handicapped” tenants to reside there and annoy and befuddle their elders. Allendale sits about a block or two south of the intersection of Allendale Street and Edmondson Avenue, a mean stretch of real estate that looks like it could have come straight out of “The Wire.”
Most of the tenants are black senior citizens. (Full disclosure: My mother is one of them.) But I didn’t get the invitation to Obama-bash from my mother. It was Louise Baynard, president of the tenants’ council at Allendale, who invited me. About 30 of the building’s residents watched a large TV screen, drank punch and munched on cake as the hour crept toward 10:15, when Obama approached the podium at Invesco Field in Denver.
The applause in the community room matched that at Invesco Field in intensity, if not in volume. And I understood that intensity. Many of those Allendale residents, ranging in age from their 60s to their 80s, probably realized they had witnessed something they never expected to see in their lifetimes: the nomination of a black man to be president by a major political party.
Baynard said she was only 22 when she went to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J. Later that year, she cast her ballot for incumbent President Lyndon Johnson in the race for the White House. Vincent Robinson, who also was in attendance, said he was only 14 when, exactly 45 years to the day earlier, he attended the March On Washington. Robinson swears there’s a shot of him in the civil-rights documentary “Eyes On The Prize.”
Everette Dudley, who was arrested while desegregating Winston-Salem, N.C., restaurants in the 1960s, was there. Dudley, Baynard and Robinson all wore Obama T-shirts. I can understand the Obama fever sweeping black America, although I’m not afflicted with it. I have no dog in the 2008 presidential fight. My guy, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, lost during the primaries.
But I noticed the point at which Allendale’s senior citizens gave Obama their loudest applause. It was when Obama uttered the indisputable truth, “Government can’t turn off the television and make a child do her homework.” Obama then repeated the challenge he made on Father’s Day for the nation’s papas — especially the black ones — to assume more responsibility for their children.
Obama’s Father’s Day speech didn’t sit well with black liberals like Michael Eric Dyson, who criticized the presidential candidate for it when Dyson was in Baltimore. Reading between the lines of Dyson’s anti-Obama tirade, I got the impression he was kind of backing Sen. Hillary Clinton, and for good reason.
Dyson and his buddies like Cornel West and Tavis Smiley can chump Hillary Clinton on race. She knows she can’t make the criticism Obama did, which is precisely why Dyson, West and Smiley were probably pulling for Hillary.
Black senior citizens, who saw more racism in one day than Dyson has seen in a lifetime, know what nonsense it is to blame every ill afflicting black America on white racism. They headed the households where the children had to be in the house and the television off at a certain hour and the homework done. They know Obama was talking truth, not foolishness.
Dyson could use a dose of the Obama fever those Allendale senior citizens have.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Maryland and Baltimore for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday.
