For Older Blacks, Election Offers Fruits of Hard Journey

About a month ago, when Meals on Wheels brought Greene his meal, they also dropped off an absentee ballot. Greene remembers growing up in Jim Crow Virginia, looking for restaurants that didn't display "white only" signs in Rosslyn or Baileys Crossroads, or being forced to ride in the back of the trolleys between Arlington and the District.

"I never thought it would happen in my lifetime," he said of Obama's campaign. "I think if I can see this and if it happens, I'll thank my lucky stars and my God for letting me live so long to be able to see the advancements of my people."

Greene spent most of his life working as an exterminator, traveling to large houses in the white, affluent Virginia suburbs such as Vienna and Falls Church. At times, some of the homeowners wouldn't allow him inside.

"I was trying to make a living the best I knew how," he recalled. "I'd been to people's houses, and they'd tell me, 'I'm sorry, you can't come in here.' Or they say, 'We didn't know you were colored.' I was spraying for roaches, fleas and termites, but they wouldn't let me in."

So he'd turn around and leave. "That was the way things was. It wasn't worth the fight."

Minnie Small, 92, remembers choosing her fights carefully, too.

She lives in Silver Spring with her daughter and granddaughter, having moved four years ago from the Bronx, N.Y.

At 20, she had traveled there from Charlotte in hopes of escaping the ugliness of Southern racism. New York wasn't Charlotte, but it wasn't the promised land either.

During the 1950s, Small was a housewife and mother whose husband, Oliver, worked as an insurance salesman for United Mutual Life in New York. Small and her family moved from Manhattan to the Bronx, with hopes of enrolling their four small children in better Catholic schools.

Raised Methodist, she converted to Catholicism. But she still had to struggle with the priests and nuns at Our Lady of Grace schools to enroll her children. "They didn't want blacks there," she said.

After weeks of meetings, the children were enrolled. Often, Small's children were the only African Americans in their classes. Once, when her son Donald was 13, she noticed that his final grades were lower than the grades on his homework and tests. She figured that the teachers did not want to give him a higher final grade so that the school wouldn't have to award him a scholarship.

"I marched down there and said, 'If my son deserves an F, you give him an F. But if my son deserves an A, you give him an A,' " she said.