While early voting results fail to give Obama nor Romney the edge in the 2012 election, a nagging question lingers – if Obama loses the election where will that leave African Americans?
Obama’s election four years ago served as tangible proof to African-American children that they could do anything they chose if they did their due diligence.
Including becoming President of the United States.
So what would the message then be to these same impressionable youth should Barack Obama be defeated by Republican challenger Mitt Romney?
The latest polls say the president still ranks as the slight favorite going into Election Day, but the race is so tight that anything could happen.
It would be the start antithesis of 2008 when 200,000 supporters gathered to absorb the historic moment in Chicago’s Grant Park. Thousands of other jubilant African-Americans across the nation took the streets to celebrate the moment Obama was declared the victory, giddy with ecstasy that one of their own would sit in the Oval Office for the first time in our nation’s history.
For black voters, the stakes are high.
“This is the most significant political season we have seen in a long time,” Rev. David Bullock, head of the Detroit Chapter of Rainbow-PUSH, told theGrio.com. “Malcolm X said something very important in that there are only two ways to change America. You will only change America by saying ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ Or you will change America by entering the ballot box.”
Turnout by the base could prove decisive for an Obama victory.
“Hopefully, before he loses, black people will do everything they can to ensure that the best person–and I do think that out of the two that President Obama is the best–is the president of the United States,” said Phillip Jackson, the executive director of the Black Star Project, a Chicago-based educational program providing mentoring to thousands of students and parents through its Saturday University program. “I would hope that he would win and that the community would be energized.”
Jackson believes an Obama loss would be devastating.
“Black America is already in trouble, so that would be compiling those feelings of hopelessness, those feelings of weakness,” he said. “We’re already in trouble. We’re already the most challenged ethnic group in this country. And so now, you’re talking about losing an African-American president? It would be devastating. You would almost see African-Americans crying in the street.”
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