July 20, 1969. November 22, 1963. December 7, 1941. April 14, 1865. July 4, 1776. All are dates etched into the memory of most Americans.
January 20, 2009 may join them as one of the days marking a change in the course of American history. It was the day Barrack Hussein Obama became the 44th president of the United States.
As was typical around the country that day, a large crowd of UNT UNT Dallas students, faculty and staff went to the auditorium classroom on campus to watch the inauguration broadcast on the big screen. Some said “amen” after the invocation. Many clapped after the oath of office. One gentleman stood during the entire inaugural speech.
But for several UNT Dallas students, watching the historic event on TV wasn’t enough. Just as college students have marched on Washington D.C. in decades past, they had to be there. Two of them agreed to share their stories and their photos with New Horizons.
Leon Lewis rode on a bus to Washington, D.C., because “it was the most appropriate way to go and make history,” he says. He joined members of Concorde Baptist Church for the 30-hour ride, as did tens of thousands of Americans from around the country. Lewis spent Monday seeing the tourist sites around D.C. “I was in a state of amazement,” he says.
Lewis — a junior studying public administration and community service with a minor in management — became separated from his tour group. “I got lost at 4th and Independence Avenue,” he recounts. A few hours later he made his way through police barricades and found himself walking down a wide street, “and I looked up, and I was the only person on Pennsylvania Avenue. No cars, no people. Talk about a chance of a lifetime. How many people can say they were on Pennsylvania Avenue alone?”
After high school, Lewis went to trade school and became a computer network administrator. Years later, after working for Sprint PCS, Bank of America, Verizon and AT&T, he decided that he wanted to do something different. He enrolled at UNTDC and joined the Information Technology staff part time.
Sharon Dickens, a junior sociology major from Midland, and her daughter, Tamasha, flew to Washington D.C. in just four hours. They went, she says, to be able to tell her six grandchildren that they were there when history was made. Her plane was 90 minutes late, so she missed the big concert at the Lincoln Memorial featuring Beyonce and several other entertainers.
Dickens couldn’t find a hotel room, so she booked a room with a host family in Bowie, Md. It ended up being a woman from Trinidad and her husband from Jamaica.
“They were really nice people. They picked us up from the airport; they showed us around Washington D.C.,” she says. “She had dinner waiting for us when we arrived … and she even fed us breakfast before she took us into town” in the mornings.
Both Dickens and Lewis describe incredible crowds at the subway stations, on the trains and at the Capitol Mall. Dickens was fortunate to get good tickets from her senator. When she and her daughter made it to the line for silver ticket holders, “there were miles and miles of people waiting in line to get to the gate,” she says. They made it to the gates as the inauguration ceremony started.
Within five minutes, they were in front of the capitol just to the right of the Capitol Reflecting Pool with a “perfect view” of the ceremony. “Because we were standing right behind the seated section, we were able to see very clearly in front of us. We were so excited, I don’t think anybody wanted to sit,” Dickens says.
Lewis, on the other hand, made the trip without a good ticket. He exited the subway station and followed the crowd, “and before I knew it, I was at the Washington Monument. I could see the capitol building … but you really couldn’t see anything except maybe 20 feet below the dome because of the barricades,” he says without a hint of disappointment.
Dickens embraced her daughter as the nation’s first African-American was sworn in. “I was very proud. I thought about Dr. Martin Luther King, and I thought about how he felt, and how I felt like his dreams were finally coming true. Everybody was just wrapped up in the moment. Everybody had so much hope and aspirations. Everybody was full of ‘What can we do? How are we going to do this? We’re going to pull together as a team. We’re going to fix everything that needs to be fixed.’ That was just the mindset of everybody."
Lewis describes the inauguration with the same amazement as Dickens. Even though he watched the swearing in on a Jumbotron video screen a mile from the capitol, Lewis says he “felt honored and privileged” to be in the crowd. “I really can’t put into words the way I felt because it was surreal to me. I couldn’t believe I was in Washington D.C. until I couldn’t feel my feet,” because of the freezing temperature.
He uses the words “amazed” and “surreal” frequently as he describes his trip to the inauguration. “There was no doubt that we were in the capitol city,” he says with a broad smile. Everything from the subway tunnels to the size of the monuments was amazing, he says with excitement. Even the tall barricades that kept him from seeing the inauguration were “really cool.”
“I’ll say this because I’m multi-cultured. It’s nice to see that our society has started to move beyond pure skin color. That’s the biggest thing that I walked away with. Just because of the color of my skin, regardless of anything else, I saw that barricade start to come down. Not to say that racism is gone, but we did see a barrier start to come down.”
“When I left after we swore in Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States, I knew that there was something that I had to do,” Lewis continues. “I knew that I have a purpose in life. Barack mentioned about us preparing the way for the future. … And I kept thinking to myself, what can I go and do and give back to our young so that we can have that America? How can I play my part in making America what we want it to be, so we can get our prestige back on the world stage because we’ve lost some of our luster? I want to do my part. I’m eager to do my part to add to the shine of the American dream of coming from nothing and being somebody.”
Lewis says he needs to share one more story. “Because the bus ride was long, on the way back it seemed young and old, we all were motivated to come and make changes to the way that we saw things and the way that we do things.” He says that young people on the bus seemed committed to listening more and taking instructions and that older riders seemed more willing to take time and explain things.
Meanwhile, Dickens stayed in D.C. and was excited to be at the capitol the next day when President Obama returned to be sworn in a second time under the correct oath.
For More Information:
David Porter
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(972) 780-3663
David.Porter@unt.edu