‘Can you believe this?’
Aug 29th, 2008 at 6:40 am by Susie
Black families watch Obama’s speech:
During the long drumroll of speeches and music, Stephen and Leslie Pierce watched their 4-year-old granddaughter get down to Stevie Wonder and wondered aloud what, possibly, could Barack Obama have to say in his much-anticipated acceptance speech.
By 10:30 p.m., when the senator from Illinois was nearly halfway through, Stephen Pierce, a 50-year-old lay minister raised by a single mom in a North Philadelphia housing project, and Leslie Pierce, the daughter of a city cop from West Oak Lane, had their answer.
“He’s on fire!” declared their 13-year-old son, Stephen, who had been ordered to turn off the Eagles game to witness history.
There was something personal, some intimate connection to their lives, in almost everything Obama had to say.
When he talked about education and opportunity for all American children, Stephen Pierce’s 25-year-old daughter Shelli, a public school teacher, threw her hands in the air and said, “Thank you!”
And when he talked with pride of his single mother’s sacrifices, Leslie gently tapped her husband’s shoulder.
Admiration. Anxiety. Disbelief. Elation. Obama’s candidacy has not merely touched the lives of African American families such as the Pierces, it has become a turning point.
