Welcoming Hope

It was a cold, cold day, but everyone who gathered to see and hear Barack Obama this weekend in downtown Baltimore had warmth in their hearts. The crowd of 40,000 seemed to be a representation of Baltimore - predominately black, but interspersed with white... beleaguered by economic and social ills, but proud of its past and filled with hope.

I rode on a bus with white college students headed to the event. I walked past many black men trying to make a buck by selling Obama souvenirs. I stood in line to go through the metal detectors with two young white girls. And at War Memorial Plaza, I stood there (for nearly two hours), flanked by an older black woman there by herself to my left, a white woman with her family to my right, and a younger white couple standing in front of me who gladly made room for a young black woman's little girl to stand next to them where she could see... It was Baltimore, at its best. It was young, old, black, white, middle class, poor, all standing together, creating warmth, united in spirit. It was hope.

When Barack came, he spoke of the support Baltimore him (60%), and he referred to history. He reminded us that when Washington burned in the War of 1812, it was the defenders of Baltimore who held back the British, the greatest Navy in the world, and provided inspiration for the Star-Spangled Banner.

While there were too many reminders of bad things this weekend (visible sharp-shooters on the roofs of several buildings, a huge police presence throughout a city that still has one of the nation's highest murder rates, and a conspicuously absent, recently indicted Mayor Sheila Dixon), there was much good...


The nation's first person of color to be elected President, stood on the steps of a memorial to a war fought by a segregated army, facing a Civil-War era City Hall building, and left on a train car where a person looking like him, not too many decades ago, could only be a porter.

Yes, it is a time of hope. Hope becoming reality before our eyes.