WP, King: "Abolitionists, Then and Now": Leonard Grimes and Barack Obama

[DeepModem Mom]

Abolitionists, Then and Now
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, July 21, 2007; Page A13

Washington, D.C., is one of those places where the sweep of centuries can be compressed into a single day. Wednesday provided an example. Two events came together with a commonality easily overlooked in a city eternally restless for breaking news: the commemoration downtown of D.C. abolitionist Leonard A. Grimes and the unveiling of Sen. Barack Obama's urban policy agenda across town in Southeast.

It began for me at the corner of 22nd and H streets NW, on the campus of George Washington University. About 50 scholars and guests, led by GWU President Stephen Trachtenberg and Ambassador Ronald Palmer, a GWU professor emeritus, gathered to dedicate a plaque commemorating Grimes, a black man born free in Virginia who became an antislavery activist and an organizer of the Underground Railroad....

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As Grimes was being honored in Foggy Bottom, Obama was east of the Anacostia River in a section of Washington where, as the senator put it, "every other child . . . lives below the poverty line. Too many do not graduate and too many more do not find work. Some join gangs and others fall to their gunfire."

Obama described the community as a place where a child's destiny could be "determined before he takes his first step" and one where a little girl's future can be "confined to the neighborhood she was born into." It sounded like the Washington in which Grimes labored.

True, Grimes's foe was slavery. More than a century later, Obama's is urban poverty.

But Obama's description of poverty -- poverty "so difficult to escape; it's isolating and it's everywhere" -- sounds like slavery to me....

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Because of his life circumstances, Obama, like Grimes, had choices that were denied to most black people. Like Grimes, Obama could have elected to take a more comfortable path. Instead, Obama, as Grimes did, chose to help those who have been left out stand up to a society that doesn't stand up for them....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/20/AR2007072001801.html?nav=most_emailed