We spent Election Day outside Washington DC’s Precinct Number 86, the polling place at Eliot Junior High School (1830 Constitution Avenue, NE).
1,536 voters cast ballots there, most of them early in the morning. The uncertified returns:
Barack Obama 1,364 votes (89.09%)
John McCain 146 votes (9.54% )
Write-Ins 11 (0.72% )
Ralph Nader 7 votes (0.46%)
Cynthia McKinney 3 votes (0.20%)
The turnout was 57 percent of registration. As we recall, 20 percent is typical.
As elsewhere, the 2008 election experience was a moving one at Eliot, but it may have had special meaning for older African American voters. They cast their ballots for the first black U.S. president in a public school that successfully used the Federal Courts to exclude black students a half-century ago:
. . . when a Negro girl named Marguerite Carr attempted to obtain from the United States District Court in the District of Columbia an order permitting her to attend a junior high school [Eliot JHS] where there were vacancies while the colored school she was attending [Browne JHS] was overcrowded and operating on a two-shift schedule, the District Court refused the order she sought; and the Federal Court of Appeals, in 1950, by a vote of two justices to one, affirmed that judgment.
As if that were not enough, Eliot Junior High School is named after Charles W. Eliot (1834-1926), educator, author, editor, and president of Harvard University. Barack Obama graduated with honors from Harvard Law School.
“In the modern world the intelligence of public opinion is the one indispensable condition for social progress.” – Charles W. Eliot
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.
