For 103-year-old Oklahoman, Obama's election was worth the wait

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BY CARRIE COPPERNOLL | Published: November 10, 2008 Comment on this article

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A Braves baseball and a cross are on display on a shelf in the bedroom of Oklahoma City resident Robert Jones. Baseball and his faith are things he says he holds dear. PHOTO BY PAUL B. SOUTHERLAND, THE OKLAHOMAN

Robert Jones saw something Tuesday night he’d never thought possible. The 103-year-old — a lifelong voter, a grandson of slaves — saw a black man elected president.

“Not in my day. Not in my day,” he said. “I never thought I would see it in my time.”

The Oklahoma City man voted for Barack Obama and watched the election unfold on the big screen TV in his den Tuesday night. It was, Jones said, the most historic day of his life.

“It’ll be a good thing,” he said, “for both sides.”

‘I never saw nothing like it’

Jones’ granddaughter, Victoria Kemp, stood in line for him Nov. 1. He’s healthy, but couldn’t have handled the four-hour wait for early voting at the Oklahoma County Election Board. When he arrived, everyone wanted to talk to him, Kemp said. People burst into spontaneous applause. Strangers took pictures of him.

“He was a rock star,” she said.

Jones said he was shocked to see so many people waiting.

“I was delighted,” said Jones, a thin man with white hair and a quick wit. “I really was. I never saw that many people. I voted a lot of times, but I never saw nothing like it before.”

Jones registered to vote in the early 1930s, but it wasn’t easy in Jim Crow days. The clerk had a habit of being unavailable for new black registrants — being home when someone was at his office, being at his office when someone went to his home. Jones finally caught up with the man and registered. He was determined to vote.

“It was a privilege that I knew that my parents and others hadn’t had,” he said.

‘Segregation was unimaginable’

Jones was born in 1905 outside Hamilton Switch, a black town a few miles north of Okmulgee that’s now called Preston. Soon after, his family moved to Vernon, another black town where Jones grew up safe and relatively insulated from the segregated world beyond.

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