[ Originally published on: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 ]
DEERFIELD -- For all of the celebrating in the nation's capital and around the country as the nation's first black president was sworn in, Juanita Nelson's reaction was, well, reserved.
The 85-year-old African-American woman, who has been active throughout her life in civil rights, anti-war, tax refusal and other social justice movements, has a skeptical outlook on the Obama presidency as a watershed event.
''I think it's interesting, but it doesn't necessarily warm the cockles of my heart,'' said Nelson. ''He's going to be presiding over something that's the same old, same old. He's only one person.''
Nelson says she didn't even vote for Obama -- or for anyone else, in fact. The only election in which she's cast a ballot, for that matter, was for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944. The same holds true for her late husband, Wally, who died in 2002 at the age of 93, and who she had first met as a newspaper reporter covering his imprisonment as a conscientious objector -- he'd walked out of a Civilian Public Service Camp that felt like ''slave labor.''
''There's not anything to vote for,'' said Nelson. ''I vote with what I do or don't do. I have to do what I believe in, you have to do what you believe in.''
As for Obama, she says, ''I'm not particularly impressed. He wouldn't enact the things that I'm interested in. It's the same capitalist system … we have the super rich and the middle class. Nobody ever says anything about the people who don't have a pot to pee in.''
Nelson, who grew up ''dirt poor'' in the outskirts of Cleveland, where her family -- originally from Georgia -- never had a car but were able to send her to Howard University on a scholarship.
She quotes Joe Lewis, interviewed after he won his second boxing match with Max Schmeling in 1938, when ''Harlem went wild.''
He said, 'I don't know what they're so excited about. They ain't no better off than they were last night.''
Nelson -- who distances herself from the hope that many people place in the new Obama presidency -- said that she's heard progressives say, ''They're going to hold his feet to the fire, but even that's not the fire I'm interested in.
''I want a different world. I want utopia.''
You can reach Richie Davis at: rdavis@recorder.com or (413) 772-0261 Ext. 269