So I couldn't stay home and watch on TV any longer.
With 15 minutes left before Barack Obama was to take the stage in Chicago, I hopped into the car and drove downtown. Thinking everyone would be at the White House, I opted for the Lincoln Memorial instead. As I approached, I could make out in the dark a group of twenty or so folks huddled over a transistor radio, silently listening to the newly elected president begin his remarks.
A transistor radio! With images of 1960 floating through my head, I walked up the steps. There was not a single member of the news media there. Not one. For all the years I've photographed news in Washington, here was this huge moment--one that tens of thousands of people were celebrating together in Grant Park and New York and everywhere else--and we had it all to ourselves: no video lights, no reporters interrupting. Just 20 citizens listening to a transistor radio under the watchful gaze of Abraham Lincoln.
I've witnessed a lot of big news events in the last twenty-three years but this may have been the most honest little moment I've ever been part of.
With time, the band of twenty-six began to disperse, and a new group of five Howard University School of Medicine students arrived, all wearing brightly colored Obama t-shirts. As they hugged and posed for photographs under the gargantuan statue of Abraham Lincoln, I asked one of them, Vanessa Grant, for the first words that came into her head this night and she wasted not a second: "speechless."
It’s a long way, I thought, from the site of the greatest speech ever given to speechless. Thinking that even Dr. King probably got a chuckle out of that one, I smiled and with that I walked back to my car in the drizzle.
Take care,
Matt, 2:39 a.m. Wednesday