Hightower Lowdown

After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.

Me, too. As you Lowdowners know, I'm wary about how progressive (much less how populist) Obama's presidency will be, but--come on, let's wallow in the moment, let's greet the historic symbolism of his election with all the glee that it deserves, and let's take energy from the hope that he presents to us.

I had my own moment of reflection shortly after Election Day. I was rummaging through some old personal papers and came across a small document from 1964. I was a junior in college that year and had just turned 21, making me eligible to vote for the first time. This little slip of paper, issued to me by the county election office, was my Certificate of Exemption From Poll Tax.

Yes, as late as '64, Texas still made people pay to vote. First-time voters were given an exemption from the tax, which I recall being about $5. That was real money in those days. The levy was intended to deter poor people, especially blacks and Mexican-Americans, from joining the democratic process. It was successful.

The poll tax, which ended in 1966, was a mirror of the time. Growing up in Denison, Texas, my school years were totally segregated--from kindergarten through my high-school graduation in 1961. The southern youth of my day were raised on the Big Lie that somehow or other racial separation was "normal." The first time I sat next to a black kid in a classroom was when I went off to college at North Texas State in '61 --and he was from my home town of Denison! I was face to face with the Lie, and that jolting reality drew me into civil-rights activism, which later moved me into antiwar activism, which later moved me... well, here I am.

And here we all are, standing in a better place than we came from. The thing we can celebrate is not solely that Obama's going into the Oval Office, but that so many people over so many years worked so hard, enduring so many ups and downs, to get to this day.