Like many Americans and citizens of the world, on the morning of Nov. 5, 2008, I awoke with a renewed sense of purpose. The night before I had seen an event I could never have imagined, the election of an African-American as president of the United States of America. It’s true—if you live long enough, anything is possible.
As I sat with family and friends watching the election results, I resigned myself to tempering my emotions. Like all Barack Obama’s supporters, I was encouraged by the strength, poise and deftness with which he ran his campaign. I knew that he was the best person for the job. But as a black man in America, I knew from experience not to let what I wanted to happen stray too far from the reality of what I knew could happen.
Like many African-Americans of my generation, my experience was steeped in the ideology that we were, at best, second-class citizens. Born in Chicago during the Depression, my future seemed preordained: I would be anonymous, doing whatever was necessary to survive. Luckily, my beloved father moved my brother Lloyd and me to Seattle, where—and I can only credit divine intervention for this—I found music and a path to a very different future.
As teenagers in Seattle, we didn’t have a Will Smith or a Michael Jordan or an Oprah Winfrey as a role model. The role models I looked to for inspiration were the musicians who lived in town and came through on tour. Men like Clark Terry, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Bobby Tucker, Bumps Blackwell and Ray Charles. Men who took me under their wing and told me about the great wide world that was out there if I wanted it. Ray and I always repeated the mantra, “Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me.” It gave us the mental fortitude to deal with the har
Thanks to that experience and my time at Garfield High School, where multiculturalism was encouraged and celebrated, I had a deep sense early on that there was more to our coexistence on this planet than “us and them.” I was not naive. I was more than aware of the racial attitudes of my country. When I was young I toured with Hampton across the segregated South on a bus full of musicians. The sole white person on the bus was the driver—we needed him to go into restaurants to get us food. We saw the requisite white and colored water fountains and rest rooms. We played the dance halls where the audience was separate, the whites sitting in the balcony. We slept in a funeral parlor in Newport News, Va.
We drove through five towns in Texas because stopping wasn’t remotely an option. When we arrived in Dallas, there was an effigy of a black man with a noose around its neck hanging from the highest church steeple in town. The message was loud and clear.
I knew that music could overcome cultural boundaries and bring people together. I saw that on my first trips to Europe, where audiences and fellow musicians of all hues engaged us as men of equal stature. I saw that as the musical director for Dizzy Gillespie’s State Department tour. Our official mandate was to conduct a goodwill tour of the Middle East, Europe and South America, but in reality we were a kamikaze band sent into hot spots to quell civil unrest in places like Cyprus, Beirut and Tehran.
I think we did a lot of good performing all over the world, sharing our music and culture by building bridges, and it instilled in me a sense that there are good people and bad people all around the world of every shade, and more times than not the good people come together and outnumber the bad. Harnessing that power of music to bring people together is one reason why I am so passionate about the creation of a secretary of the arts.
I paid close attention to how the world viewed America and how America viewed its citizens. I watched as a young preacher from Atlanta rose to preach peaceful civil disobedience, as a Nation of Islam minister proclaimed that self-reliance was the answer, and as a people embraced and celebrated black pride and individualism. I watched as our country slowly realized that African-Americans would no longer lie down and accept oppression, no matter what kind of veil covered it. We expected all the rights afforded us in the Constitution of our nation and we worked to excel and achieve our dreams, because the alternatives simply were not an option.
As a people we advanced to the highest levels of politics, business and the arts. But for all that we had accomplished and overcome, there I sat on Nov. 4 watching with measured anticipation as the vote came in.
When it was clear that Obama had won, my heart swelled with a joy I have felt only when my children were born.
After all that our people had suffered and endured, from the genocide of the Middle Passage, to the torture of body and spirit and the systematic dismantling of our families under slavery, to the terrorism which came out of Reconstruction, to the institutionalized racism and the struggle for civil rights . . . a man who looked like me would now be the president of the United States.
And like so many of us, I wept for all of the souls that sacrificed their lives to get to this moment. I wept for those who are no longer with us, and who could never have fathomed that this could happen. Mostly I wept for my father and my brother Lloyd. I wish they had lived to see this moment.
Obama’s election has brought a renewed sense of hope and faith in America from around the world. In the weeks following his election, I received calls of exultation from 15 heads of state. Obama has a tremendous amount of work to do to set America back on the proper course, but he has a spirit of cooperation from the world behind him.
He will of course have his detractors here at home. They’ve already begun their campaign to discredit him and tear down his presidency and he hasn’t even taken office yet. But he has instilled in the people who elected him a sense of hope for our country that we haven’t seen in a long time. With that kind of collective positivity, I know that a brighter future lies ahead.
America still has a lot of work to do with regard to race, but it gives me great comfort to know that every American boy and girl (thank you, Hillary Clinton) from here on can grow up believing that “one day I might be president,” and it won’t be an unthinkable fantasy.
God bless you, President Obama. The hopes of the nation are with you.
Quincy Jones, a composer, producer, arranger and conductor, has won 27 Grammy Awards. He is the author of “The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey and Passions.”
