By Vernon E. Jordan, Jr,:

Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. is Senior Managing Director, Lazard  LLC, and Senior Counsel, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLC.

This is excerpted from the book, “Make It Plain: Standing Up and Speaking Out,” by Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. (with Lee A. Daniels) and his comments at a book party held Dec. 2, 2008, in The Rainbow Room, New York, N.Y.

Because I am still afloat from the experience that we all shared watching election returns, I want to share with you what that momentous, incredulous moment meant to me.

I shared a wonderful dinner with friends of many years at a friend’s apartment. The guests departed around 9:30 after watching the early returns together. I think we all left to witness history-in-the-making in our own way. I returned to my pad, and poured a healthy glass of a spirituous beverage to witness something I thought I would never live to see.

When the networks declared Barack Hussein Obama the President-Elect of the United States of America, my eyes flooded with tears. And I heard my mother saying her daily prayer: “This is the day the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

When America elected a new president – Barack Obama – it sent out a resounding clarion call saying many things:

1. We want change. We want to right the ship of state which has been wandering, lost at sea.
2. We want to rediscover our moral compass at home and reassert our moral authority abroad.
3. We want a higher level of civility in our politics, less polarization, no more blinding partisanship, and no more bitter divisions.
4. We want no more mean-spirited words or deeds casting a dark and disenchanting spell on our politics.
5. We want authenticity, directness, honesty and plain talk from our leader.

This clarion call said something else:

1. That the so-called “Bradley Effect” is dead and buried in American politics.
2. That the solid Republican South is not so solid Republican any more.
3. That there is no difference between “real” Americans and other Americans; that wherever we are, whatever color or sex or sexual preference, born or naturalized, we are all Americans.
4. That Karl Rove’s promised “Permanent Republican Majority” is not so permanent any more.

That clarion call on Election Day said, along with Langston Hughes, from his 1938 poem, “Let America be America Again”:

O, let America be America again– The land that never has been yet– And yet must be–the land where every man is free. The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME– Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.

When I think of Barack Obama’s success in this election, I think about the many Americans who helped bring about this springtime moment in American history:
Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King., Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, A. Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Ruby Hurley, Daisy Bates, Medgar Evers, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Jacob Javits, Everett Dirksen, Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Julian Bond and countless others.

But this moment in time calls to my mind – in addition to the leaders – those unknown, unheralded, unappreciated disturbers of the unjust peace for whom no statues have been built; no theses or dissertations have been written; no parks bearing their names have been dedicated. But they are our heroes, too, and President-Elect Obama and the rest of us stand on their shoulders.

Lest we forget them in our exhilaration of the moment, I want to mention three individuals: George Elmore; Dr. Lonnie Smith; and Reverend Primus King – and the lawsuits which bear witness to their contributions to America: Elmore v. Rice; Smith v. Allwright; and King v. Chatman.

These courageous disturbers of the unjust peace were plaintiffs in the white primary cases in South Carolina, Texas and Georgia, respectively. The white primaries operated by the states’ Democratic Party had rules restricting the primaries to white people only. These plaintiffs sued the state parties claiming a violation of their Constitutional rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP was their leading counsel.

George Elmore was a businessman in Columbia, S.C. Lonnie Smith was a doctor in Houston, TX. And Rev. Primus King was a barber and itinerate Baptist preacher in Columbus, Ga.

I met George Elmore and Dr. Lonnie Smith, but Rev. Primus King, my fellow Georgian, was my friend. He was born in rural Alabama, and grew up in Columbus, where he was a barber. Every Sunday he put on his black cutaway coat, gamma-striped britches and spats and went into the countryside to preach the Word. Primus King was unlettered and unlearned, so that when he preached from the book of the Bible, First John, he called it the “I John.”

But a lack of formal learning did not diminish the surpassing faith and patriotism that spurred Primus King to walk into the Muscogee County Courthouse in 1943 to register to vote in the white primary. Denied by the County Registrar, King drove to Atlanta to seek the advice of A.T. Walden, one of the South’s crusading civil rights attorneys who, in turn, called Thurgood Marshall. Marshall then called two white lawyers in Georgia – one in Macon, one in Columbus – who agreed to file the lawsuit on King’s behalf. Think of that – in 1943, two white lawyers in Georgia working for Thurgood Marshall to help black people vote in the Georgia primary!

When word of the lawsuit reached them, the power structure of Muscogee County called a meeting in the Courthouse and summoned Primus King. There he was, all alone before the pillars of segregationist power, with no national media to focus the nation’s attention on what was happening.

The county officials said: “Primus, if you don’t withdraw, you could end up in the Chattahoochee River.”

King shot back: “If I do get thrown, at least I’ll be thrown in for something, ‘cause all those other black people were thrown in for nothing.”  And he turned and walked out.

In October, 1945, the Federal District Court in Macon ruled in King’s favor. In March 1946, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld that ruling, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the Georgia Democratic Party’s appeal.

From George Elmore, Lonnie Smith and Primus King to Barack Obama.

From Election Night to January 20, 2009, lest we forget that moments like this are not happenstance: They are the direct result of the work, sacrifice, patriotism and passion of disturbers of the unjust peace.

And on January 20, when Barack Hussein Obama, a community organizer, takes the Oath of Office “To Protect and Defend” the United States of America, let us all remember the poetry of James Weldon Johnson who wrote, speaking of the struggle of Black Americans, in his classic, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” also known as the Negro National Anthem:

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears have been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, Our God, where we met Thee;
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our GOD,
True to our native land.

James Weldon Johnson June 17, 1871 – June 26, 1938