“God has vindicated the black folk,” the Rev. Shirley Caesar-Williams said as a member of her Raleigh congregation, Mount Calvary Word of Faith Church, brandished a flag and another marched among the pews blowing a ram’s horn.
“Too long we’ve been at the bottom of the totem pole, but he has vindicated us, hallelujah,” the Grammy-winning gospel singer cried. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t have nothing to put my head down for, praise God. Because when I look toward Washington, D.C., we got a new family coming in. We got a new family coming in. And you know what? They look like us. Amen, amen. They look like us.”
At a white church in Mississippi, where roughly nine in 10 whites voted for Republican John McCain, the scene was more muted.
The neighborhood around the Alta Woods United Methodist Church in Jackson has seen its demographics shift from white to black in recent decades, and most of the parishioners have moved to the suburbs. While the Rev. David W. Carroll recognized Obama’s election as a “historic shift,” he spent just as much time praising McCain’s patriotism in defeat.
“As the crowd began to boo a little bit ... he quieted them down and said, ‘Now is not my time, but I’m an American first and I will serve the president-elect,”’ he said. “In a loss, he showed us still how he could win through his service,
Perhaps nowhere was the weight of history more palpable Sunday than at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, from whose pulpit King spread his message of inclusion and across from which he lies entombed.
When the Rev. Raphael G. Warnock tried to put into words what it meant for Obama to win Virginia, where the first American slaves landed nearly 400 years ago, his words were drowned out by applause and cheers from a capacity crowd whose faces captured the spectrum of the human rainbow.
“Barack Obama stood against the fierce tide of history and achieved the unimaginable,” he said. “But he did not get here by himself. Give God some credit. He is the Lord.”
But while he told the congregation that it was a time for celebration, he also reminded them it was a serious time.
“We still have a whole lot of work to do,” he said. “You have two little girls who will grow up in the White House. Around the corner, you have two little girls who will grow up in a crack house.”
Among those in attendance was the slain civil rights leader’s sister, Christine King Farris. She was reminded of her brother’s prescience.
“As he predicted the night before he left us, ‘I may not be with you, but as a people we will reach the promised land,”’ she said stoically. “That promised land was realized Tuesday. Yes, it is our promised land.”
