The State We Lost
The State We Lost
In the summer of 2008, I went to work as a volunteer for the Obama campaign in my hometown of Gainesville, Georgia. To my and everyone’s surprise, the campaign had hired a field organizer for Gainesville, a nineteen-year-old Jewish student from Northwestern, Adam Yalowitz. What made the choice of Adam surprising was that Hall County, which includes Gainesville, has even fewer Jews (under 1 percent) than it does African Americans (7 percent).
Adam held his first meeting in the basement of St. John’s church. There was a decent crowd considering that the number of registered Democrats in Gainesville was only 20 percent of the county’s population. Adam told us about himself, about why he thought Barack Obama should be president, and then he did something that was both surprising and brilliant. He started talking about us.
He told us that after the 1936 tornado destroyed large swaths of Gainesville, a “new” black neighborhood was built on top of an old landfill beside the railroad tracks. Cargill and Purina factories sprang up one right after another, surrounding what became known as Newtown. In segregated Georgia, its residents couldn’t move to less crowded neighborhoods. Most folks planted small gardens to feed their families, unaware that the soil was putrid because of the landfill. People died early and often it seemed, and so in 1950 a group of housewives formed the Newtown Florists Club in order to care for the sick and collect money for funeral wreaths.
Through their contact with family after family, the women began to notice a pattern in the diseases and deaths in the community. And what began as a simple charity organization evolved over the decades to become a civil rights and environmental justice powerhouse in the black community. The Newtown Florists Club was able to get greater representation in city government and pressure local industries to pollute less.
When Adam finished speaking, I felt a tremendous sense of awe and shame. Someone who had been here for about five minutes (and was younger than I) knew more about my own community than I did. I was sitting in that church basement because I wanted Barack Obama to be president, but Adam made me want to look Gainesville in the face and see what was really there.
So much has been written about the political dynamics of states Barack Obama dominated, flipped, or barely won, but I learned more about him, about politics, and about myself from working in a state he lost. In the summer of 2008, the Obama campaign in Georgia concentrated all its efforts on a massive voter registration drive, and in Hall County, which in 2004 gave George W. Bush 78 percent of the vote in a state that gave him 57 percent, no one was coy about who we were targeting. We felt sure that only the black and Latino vote could help us.
After I was hired, Adam and I set up our office on Athens Street in the old Democratic Party headquarters in Newtown, down the road from a series of barber and beauty shops. Our job was simple: track down as many unregistered African Americans and Latinos as we could find, register them, and get them to vote. But if our task was straightforward, achieving it was not. Although there were plenty of unregistered voters to go around—as many as 600,000 statewide according to the campaign—Adam and I soon realized that uncovering them was an adventure all in itself.
Going door to door was an obvious strategy but ridiculously time-consuming. We might spend all day walking and pounding on doors only to wind up with thirty registrations. People, especially in the Latino communities, were terrified of white kids with clipboards and simply would not answer. They feared we were immigration agents. I could always hear the blaring television or see the fluttering movement of the curtains, but no matter how long we stood, the door remained closed.
Setting up shop outside of businesses like the local Wal-Mart proved to offer much higher yields, but even this was tricky. We were instructed not to lie to businesses about who we worked for, but as soon as most found out we were working for Obama, we were turned away with a sneer or an “I wouldn’t vote for him for dog catcher.” I often felt as if my fellow organizers and I were part of a secret underground group divining new ways to achieve impossible goals. We usually relied on our growing force of local volunteers, who offered hundreds of hours of work for free, sneaking us in through the back door because they had a friend or an uncle inside. Then there was always the last resort: registering people in the parking lot until the security guards chased you away.
For two sweltering months, July and August, I lived and breathed voter registration. It got so that I could barely pass people in the grocery store without feeling the urge to ask if they were registered to vote. Temperatures often pushed into the triple digits, and the feeling of being in a battle intensified as the election grew closer. A high school volunteer of ours, Richie, canvassing in his own neighborhood, had a gun pulled on him by an old man and was chased off the property with the threat of bullets and a slew of racial slurs. Richie wasted no time bouncing back, excited to be able to regale others with his near-death experience.
But the incident, coupled with the threat from a radio caller who promised to kill the Obama organizer and volunteers in a local Starbucks, provided a steady reminder that we were outnumbered and unwanted. Although nationally the Georgia campaign was seen as naive and sentimental on the part of Obama for America, no one in the state thought our presence was funny.
The sense of embattlement brought us together. Our team of twelve organizers, which grew to cover three counties in northeast Georgia, was extremely close. We ate together, drank together, avoided sleeping together, and shared crazy stories of the day with those who were bound to have crazier stories than our own. The notion of war-buddy bonds sounds hyperbolic, but I think it was true for staff and volunteers in Georgia for whom the campaign was not only about winning and electing Barack Obama but about being able to believe that our home was capable of change. That’s what made voter registration so powerful. It was about having a choice that would last beyond the election.
One Saturday afternoon I approached a despondent-looking young, white kid as he leaned against the double doors that led into Wal-Mart. I asked him if he was registered, and he stared at me blankly for a few minutes before admitting that he wasn’t. I handed over the forms, and he sat down in the middle of the walkway to fill them out. His writing was painfully slow, and as I leaned over to make sure he understood, I saw the tattoo of a swastika between his thumb and forefinger. I spent twenty minutes with him, patiently explaining each block, all the while feeling disgust and defiance in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t want this kid to vote—maybe he was even the crazy radio caller—but as I stuck his form in the folder with all the rest, I wasn’t sorry that I had registered him. The process he’d just participated in would help lead to his extinction.
It wasn’t just white supremacists, young and old, with whom we had to contend. There were times when I felt as if I were fighting with the very community we were trying to help (and that we needed) the most. Mistrust and suspicion of my skin did not go away just because I was wearing a Barack Obama T-shirt. I stood at the gates of mostly minority East Hall High School near Newtown one Friday night, my hair in braids, looking like a hopeful high schooler and having no luck. Everyone who passed claimed to be registered. It wasn’t until I approached a woman in the stands whose son I had once tutored that my luck turned. She began prodding those standing around who had refused my request to fill out a voter registration form minutes earlier.
I understood her gift. I could be trusted now. I was not just an anonymous white girl out to trick them. I wondered how many unregistered people had walked the other way because I inadvertently reminded them of every sneer, slur, and unfairness they had ever encountered. The same thing happened when I tried to register some guys playing basketball at a community center. They asked me why someone from the McCain campaign would want to register them to vote. They refused to believe that I worked for Obama. These young men, with rough mouths and deft hands, several of whom already had prison records, could not fathom how someone with a pale naïve face could be on their side.
There were other stories, too. There was the Latino man who had become a citizen the very afternoon we ran into him and who nearly tore the form from my clipboard, eagerly teasing his girlfriend, “This is for citizens only.” And there was the student club at Gainesville’s community college whose members had all been brought to the United States illegally as children and who would have been deported immediately if discovered. These students spent hours going door to door in a community that regarded them with disdain, registering voters for a candidate they could not vote for.
The voices I encountered in our office, at doors, and on phones were not harmonious, but for the first time in my life, I was seeing the South from different angles, and it made my work extraordinarily concrete. I joined the Obama campaign at a very difficult time in my life. I had recently returned from a year as a teacher in Namibia: a year of isolation and the constant frustration of not being able to do enough. I’d left for Namibia months after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, hoping to help people thousands of miles away. But the problems I encountered in Namibia had been so enormous and the results so minimal that I returned home with a new awareness of my own limitations and the nagging conviction that my year abroad had been in vain.
The Obama campaign offered a direct contrast to the feeling of powerlessness I had experienced in Namibia. Here there were lists to be checked off, deeds to be done, accomplishments that could be quantified every day. Ten, twenty, thirty, a hundred people could now vote because of what we were doing. My actions were, I felt, riding a tide of history, the assurance that we were part of something big, a moment in our lives that would help us define ourselves. I lost thirty pounds. I slept an average of four hours a night for weeks. But there was an immeasurable exhilaration about this form of overabundant devotion.
In the run-up to the election, I spoke to many volunteers for whom Obama was more than a man. He was, as he has often acknowledged, a canvas for their hopes for the future or a validation for the sacrifices of the past. What we never talked about was that this canvas was true for us, the organizers and staff, as well. Underneath a genuine belief in the candidate was a deeper fixation with a power and a mission we saw as essential and pure. It reminded me of the look in older Namibians’ faces when they spoke of the revolt against apartheid or the campaign volunteers who told stories of marching in the civil rights movement. There was a piece of them that missed the fight, that longed for those days when they were part of a righteous army—one that battled simple and obvious evils and earned victories that were sweet and clear. In this way, the old who had suffered and the young who had not were the same: loving the meanest and most beautiful parts of life the most, while sharing a common uncertainty about the muddled gray middle.
I wasn’t in Georgia on election night. I was on the top story of an office building in Cleveland, Ohio. Shortly after Labor Day, despite our having registered 250,000 voters statewide, the campaign disbanded the Georgia field program. The Obama campaign had decided there was no point in throwing more resources at a state that was ultimately going to give John McCain and Sarah Palin its electoral votes. I ended up working in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights. By 5 a.m. on November 4, I was sitting at a desk in our “boiler room,” a campaign office filled to overflowing with lawyers, phones, and computers. It was strange after months of phone calls and doors and working in the field to sit suspended above the city on the day we had all been preparing for.
As evening approached, our eventual triumph became increasingly clear. In the final celebratory hours I realized that the intoxicating momentum of the campaign had quietly given way to the relief of success. The work that had thrust me into so many different lives was no longer necessary. I imagined victory parties taking place on front porches and inside church basements in Newtown, but I could not imagine what the day after the election would look like there. I always thought you had to be old to feel nostalgic, or at least be distanced from the moment by time. But I was wrong. Nostalgia is about the potency of the way you felt once and the recognition that you may never feel that way again.
Next – Enoch Bevel: Faithful to My Father’s Dream
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Jessica Barrow was born in 1983 in Thomaston, Georgia. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, she spent a year in Omatjete, Namibia, as an English and math teacher. She worked for the Obama campaign in 2008 and is currently employed by the U.S. Department of Education.
