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International Journal of Servant-Leadership

Abstract

Most of the Black community remember where they were the day the news broke that Barack Obama would be the 44th president of the United States. In 2008, I was living in the historic city of Atlanta where I had left behind the dust of an unpaved country road in Russellville, Arkansas. I had wondered then if any of the inhabitants of the predominately White town were somewhere celebrating too. I stared at the screen in the hip Inman Park area with my brother and mixture of folks of different races, and we took to the streets and started shouting and laughing with strangers in the street, “Yes we can! Yes, we can.” I was so hopeful. I had not lived through what our parents had experienced as children in the Jim Crow South, or fully understood what our grandmother who was born in 1918 had seen in her day, but I’d had my own taste of racism. I had received a unique education from the time our parents moved us from our hometown of Pine Bluff, Arkansas to Russellville. My father had accepted a nuclear chemist position at AP&L, now Entergy, and I’m sure my parents too were filled with hope as they moved into a new home in our all-White neighborhood.

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