Fri 24 October 2008
Obama in Gary, part II
BACK AT THE OFFICE
A self-proclaimed community activist, Regina Cossey works has worked a little bit each day, making phone calls.
“You make sure that they know that the old folks are going to make it happen,” said the 67-year-old Cossey, a black woman with light-colored contacts.
She has spent years agitating in Gary, Ind., her home, her community, trying to organize for change in a city that needs change dearly.
Cossey is a part of the “Women for Obama” group, which is based on the idea that women voters are best persuaded through the advice of other women.
“Everybody hopes that he wins, but we need more than hope to win this election,” said Karen Freeman-Wilson, the former Indiana attorney general who helps lead the women’s group.
The campaign for Indiana began in full in April for the May 6 primary contest, when local residents organized in mass and droves descended on Gary from out-of-state.
For the general election, Obama has opened up to 50 offices statewide, with contacts made in all 92 counties. Lake County, which includes Gary, has three offices, and Porter County to the east has two.
Lake County saw more than 13,500 new registered voters in the primary, second only to Indianapolis’ Marion County, according to Gary’s local paper, the Post-Tribune.
“What has once been a seemingly apathetic voting population, I have seen it very energized,” said Freeman-Wilson.
In the 2000 census, Gary was shown to be 84 percent black and 12 percent white, the highest black majority of any city with more than 100,000 people.
Turnout in Lake County, which has been at or below the state average in past elections, was at 51 percent in the May primary, when the state turnout was only 40 percent.
Freeman-Wilson said Gary typically sends 20,000 voters to the polls — 30,000 in a hotly contested mayoral race.
But this fall, “I think we could see 43,000 to 48,000, and that could make the difference in the state,” Freeman-Wilson said. “We think 40,000 votes could turn Indiana.”
The Obama campaign is organizing Gary with three field organizers who have broken the city down into 15 neighborhoods, from Michael Jackson’s boyhood home of Roosevelt to the rough-and-tumble Tolleston to the relatively prosperous Miller Beach.
Residents can more easily feel a part of a neighborhood than an oddly drawn precinct, although neighborhood volunteers are eventually further broken down into precincts. A volunteer team leader is identified and assigned to each neighborhood.
Volunteers are given the goals of the campaign, such as voter registration quotas but are allowed to use their own devices to achieve the goals.
The number of volunteers active in the Gary campaign started small in late July and August, but has grown in each subsequent week, from a few people to a few dozen to hundreds of people, volunteering on the weekends.
Regina Cossey is helping to organize registration in her West Midtown neighborhood with another fellow, she said.
SURPRISE PROGRESS
Ann Ramsey, 74, volunteers in the Miller Beach neighborhood on the east side of Gary.
“We can’t continue in the direction we are going — it’s going to destroy our country and the standing of our country in the world,” Ramsey said.
A retired educator at Gary Schools, Ramsey grew up in segregated Little Rock, Ark. Arkansas was not Mississippi, her parents were able to vote, and Ramsey said her schools were good, just segregated.
But since there were no pools open to blacks until the late ‘40s, her father taught her to swim in open bauxite mines. When she was 15, she trained to be one of the first black lifeguards at the newly opened city pools.
“I think it hurt me more than anything,” Ramsey recalled. “I had to go to the white pool to train as a lifeguard. I could never go in the water. I had to take all of my exercises on the land.
“I could not understand what was wrong with me that I could not get in the water.”
Picking Obama over the Clintons was a tough choice for Ramsey. She had helped with Bill Clinton’s first run for Arkansas attorney general and always supported them.
“I watched (Obama’s) decision-making process,” Ramsey said. “He had not been ingrained in the old politics of that partisan controversy, and Hillary had been. And I felt, if anyone was able to bring about change, he was the best candidate to be able to.”
She had an uncle who was a civil rights activist, and he died last year at the age of 94. An Obama supporter from the start, he caught the beginning of Obama’s improbable campaign.
“I just wish he would’ve seen this moment,” she said.
Now a true believer in Obama, the thought of a black, or biracial, nominee would never have crossed her mind just a few years ago, Ramsey said.
“I imagine a lot of Americans are surprised. You know, he has to be a special candidate,” she said. “We look forward to a brighter, more unified America.”
On the very day that Joe Biden was announced as Obama’s running mate, Ramsey’s Miller Beach group posted a wooden “Obama & Biden” sign at a well-trafficked intersection.
By September, the volunteers in Miller were running strong enough that they seldom came into the downtown office.
KEEPING THE CITY ACTIVE Tammi Davis, the president of the Gary chapter of the NAACP, said the people of Gary are energized in a way that they haven’t been since the civil rights era.
She would like to see that energy not stop just with a presidential candidate, but lead to engagement with local officials on local issues.
“For too long, Gary has suffered from a lack of involvement in the community. People have been complacent of the way things are,” Davis said. “With the resurgence of getting involved in the political process came the resurgence again of how to get involved in their community and how best to make their communities work.”
She said Gary has a long way to go before it will get better, and while crime may be down, the city is no better off economically now than it ever was.
Davis said Gary’s chief concerns are failing schools, job loss, deteriorating infrastructure, high property taxes and a city government that periodically shuts down services.
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