Election defined a shift in history for local residents

ROBIN TRIMARCHI Gloria Battle, who owns Battle & Battle Funeral Home in Phenix City, holds a copy of the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer front page the day after Illinios Sen. Barak Obama was elected to be the 44th president of the United States. Battle also has an Atlanta Constitution newspaper page of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. following his death in 1968. "It's truly amazing," Battle said of the election of the first African-American for president. "I hopped up out of the bed and said 'Thank you, Jesus!' when they announced it."

Tuessday night, Lila Star went to bed at 8:30.

"I couldn't watch it," said the 77-year-old Columbus restaurant owner. "I wanted to wake up in the morning and hear about it."

But a few hours later, daughter Sarah Porter called to say that the major television networks had declared Barack Obama the winner.

"It really felt good," she said Thursday while prepping chicken for frying at the Royal Café.

Star shares the sentiments of a generation of older black Americans who came out of the Great Depression as children, lived through segregation and the struggle for civil rights and have now seen the election of the nation's first black president.

'For my grandchildren'

Former Spencer High principal Franklin Douglass, like Star, enjoyed the historical significance of Obama's election.

"There has been a lot of progress in my time," Douglass said. "But I thought I was beyond this one. I hoped my son or grandchildren would see it. I didn't think I would."

Neither did Gloria L. Battle. On Wednesday morning, the retired educator wanted a copy of the Ledger-Enquirer.

She wanted proof of the moment and something she could pass down to future generations. After getting a copy of that paper, she laminated it.

"It will never turn yellow," Battle said. "My family will have that paper 50 years from now. It's for my grandchildren and their children. That's history."

Battle knows a little bit about history. She was there when it was being made. She has an Atlanta newspaper photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. framed on her desk.

In 1955 and '56, Battle was a student at Alabama State University in Montgomery. That was during the Montgomery bus boycott that helped spark the civil rights movement. She attended Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where King was pastor.

"I never thought I would live to see this," she said. "After seeing what I saw in the '50s, I just never thought I would see this."

Answered prayers

The Rev. J.C. Harris was there in the 1950s, too.

The 83-year-old pastor of Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church on Old Cusseta Road was a young minister in Albany, Ga., during the height of the civil rights movement. He hosted King in his Albany church and worked in the movement.

"I prayed to see this day, and God has answered my prayers," Harris said. "This is the dream that Dr. King spoke of. This is the dream that has been there all of these years. To see it come to pass in my lifetime is a miracle. This is not an act of man. This is God's work."

The fact that Obama received significant support from white Americans was not lost on Harris.

"It wasn't just my people who elected him," Harris said. "It was also your people."

Phenix City dentist Hugh Ogletree agrees. Ogletree, a 60-year-old black Republican, voted for Obama, the first Democrat presidential candidate he has supported since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Ogletree attended a segregated public high school in Auburn, Ala., then Tuskegee University on a football scholarship. He was among the first black students accepted at the University of Alabama School of Dentistry.