In Chicago, 'Everything Stops' For Obama Inauguration
CHICAGO (AP) -- Ninety-year-old Timuel Black says he all but lost hope for the country when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy were assassinated in 1968. Now he is going to Washington for an event he never thought he'd live to see.
At Jackie Robinson Academy - where children have walked the halls since November talking about becoming doctors, engineers and even the president - regular class will come to a halt Tuesday so they can watch Barack Obama sworn in as the nation's 44th president.
From the elderly whose grandparents were born into slavery to children whose grandparents weren't born until well into the civil rights movement, millions are ready to celebrate Obama's inauguration as the nation's first African American president.
Nowhere is the excitement more palpable than in his home state and hometown, where pride runs deep among people of all races, faiths and ages.
But if Obama transcended race - he was, for example, the first Democrat since 1964 to carry the overwhelmingly white state of Indiana - here in Chicago, particularly on the South Side where Obama got his start as a community organizer, there is no mistaking the significance of his election.
"This gives me a deeper faith and hope that the impossible we can do," said Black, the grandson of slaves who was once an adviser to King and is attending the inaugural at the invitation of Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin. "What we have accomplished ... I considered impossible."
Adding to the excitement among students at Jackie Robinson is that Obama, like many of them, was raised for a time by a single mother, and "they look at what he came through," said Principal Jacqueline Thomas.
"When I grow up I'm gonna work in the White House," said 8-year-old third-grader Christina Rowe. "And be a cheerleader."
"One of us could become president," said Travis Ivy Jr., another third-grader.
So on Tuesday, Illinoisans will celebrate.
Hundreds, if not thousands, are headed to Washington, D.C., including marching bands from Chicago high schools and 30 eighth graders who are going courtesy of the state's newest senator, Roland Burris.
At the other end of the state, dozens of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale students are chartering two buses for the 10-hour ride to Washington.
In Chicago, schools all over the city will watch the inaugural on television and hold mini-inaugural balls. An after-school ball at Williams Preparatory Academy, a middle school, will include speeches by the student body president and vice president.
"Everything stops," predicted Jo Ann Roberts, the principal of Paderewski Learning Academy, when asked what will happen during the inauguration, adding that parents are being invited to the school to watch with their children.
Thirty-seven seniors from Morgan Park High School on the South Side will be among the estimated 600 people expected to attend one of the city's biggest galas, the $175-a-ticket Chicago Inaugural Ball at the McCormick Place's Skyline Ballroom.
"I wish you could have heard them scream," said Principal Beryl Shingles, recalling when the students learned a local businessman would buy their tickets, rent the boys' tuxedoes, buy gowns for any girls who needed them and send a coach to pick them up.
"These kids, their response was like they were going to D.C.," she said.
That's exactly where 22-year-old Cole Singleton is headed. He decided it was worth paying $165 for a bus trip with other SIU-Carbondale students to be part of history.
"I'm going to be in Washington when the first black president gets sworn in," said Singleton, who voted for Obama in November.
But for 70-year-old Josephine Wade, it's more important to be in Chicago. She'll attend a party at Captain's Hard Time Dining, a restaurant she owns with her son near Martin Luther King Drive, surrounded by friends - some of whom, like her, remember the days of white-only drinking fountains and restrooms.
"I would never go to Washington (for a party)," she said. "It's a more sacred time to me than that."
And for many, the day also promises to be an emotional one.
Black said he cried when he helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp as a young soldier in World War II and again when his son died. But that's about it.
He sounds, though, like he expects to cry again.
"These will be tears of joy," he said.
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Associated Press writer Jim Suhr in St. Louis contributed to this report.
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AP | Don Babwin | January 17, 2009 07:08 PM