Helen Gordon made a pilgrimage with her family back to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. It was very cold, intensely crowded, but very worthwhile. For Gordon, the election and inauguration of the first African-American president was something she could not have even hoped to imagine.
Gordon knows firsthand about the struggle of African-Americans and minorities in this country. She had made a historic pilgrimage before.
Nine years before Alabama Gov. George Wallace stood on the steps at the University of Alabama in 1963 to bar black students from registering for classes there, Gordon and a handful of other students quietly made history at the Southwestern Louisiana Institute. In 1954, Gordon was among the first group of African-American students to attend classes at Southwestern, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Louisiana. Administrators at that school were successful in keeping the new students and their enrollment quiet, prescience of the danger and controversy to come.
One of seven children from a poor but proud family from tiny Abbeville, La., Gordon, 75, said she was more concerned about simply going to college than being a pioneer. She remembered how the students were isolated and ignored by both their fellow students and the faculty she told the Reporter in 2004 when she and others from that first group of African-American students were honored for their courage by the university. It was a lonely and somewhat frustrating experience.
Yet Gordon, now a retired teacher from Seattle Public Schools, has remained optimistic and upbeat about her life. And in the meantime she became a bit of an activist herself, campaigning for fair housing laws among other issues. She and her husband, LeRoy, have lived on the Island for over 40 years and raised two children now grown, Bridget and Lee, who attended Island schools and graduated from Mercer Island High School.
Her son, Lee, who lives in Seattle with his family, knew it was important for his mother to attend the inauguration. He said that he told his employer that he was going to Washington, D.C.
“I just told him I was going to be gone,” he said. “I didn’t ask. I had to get my mother there. She was the one. We needed to take her.”
Gordon was reluctant to go because of the crowds and the many details that needed to be worked out.
But her children went ahead and made plans anyway.
Lee Gordon was able to wrangle a single inaugural ticket for his mother, from former Seattle City Councilman Larry Gossett, who had obtained the ticket from Rep. Jim McDermott. Bridget Gordon, who lives in California, flew in to meet her family in New York and travel the last leg together.
On the morning of the inauguration, the family got up at 5:30. It was just 17 degrees and the wind was blowing. The trek to the National Mall was lighthearted, but arduous.
“It was so cold; even with my new R.E.I. gloves that I bought just for the inauguration,” Helen Gordon said.
After squeezing onto the subway and walking a long way toward the entrance to the National Mall’s purple section, something was wrong at the gate. The crowd had been stopped.
With little Isabella upset and the cold temperature more than they could stand, some of the group headed back to a cousin’s apartment nearby and settled in to watch it on television, while Lee Gordon and his cousin returned to the Mall.
Lee Gordon shares his mother’s view of the day, describing the atmosphere and the emotion of the day as “absolutely wonderful, unbelievable, fantastic.” Despite being far away from the actual ceremonies, and the freezing temperatures, it was the people around them in the crowd who made it a memorable day.
His mother agreed.
“Everyone was talking, talking, just so happy and interested in you and each other,” she said. “One man from Sacramento was so interested in my story. He just kept asking more and more questions. He said, ‘Of all the people I have met, your story is the most compelling.’”
“It was a day when race and social status meant nothing,” she said. “We were all the same, together.”
