By Rev. Dr. Barbara A. Reynolds

Millions of African-Americans are waiting to exhale with our champion U.S. Senator Barack Obama so close to the finish line to become the first black President of the United States. Yet experience and instinct raises the bitter question: Could dirty tricks steal this date with destiny again?              

            Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000, but the Republican-packed Supreme Court stole the election from him.  In 2004, the vote in some black areas such as Franklin County, Ohio where my relatives live was traumatically suppressed. Some of my relatives who were in their eighties couldn’t stand in long lines for hours in bad weather to vote and returned home, where in white Republican-areas, voting took only minutes.

          Even as my heart races in anticipation, my cynicism is also building. Maybe I have seen too much. In the late sixties as a college student, I was almost killed trying to register blacks to vote in Brownsville, Tenn.  Back in the day, blacks would be thrown off their land, beaten or worse if they dared vote. Often Southern blacks had to count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap or cite the Constitution backwards to register to vote.

       We have turned back that scandalous era of voter disenfranchisement through the blood of martyrs, both black and white, but dirty tricks linger on. With history as our guide, we still must not trust the polls that say Senator Obama is leading Senator John McCain as a reason to relax and not vote. Senator Obama is still the underdog, until victory is officially declared.

     . Across the nation, we can see how the Republicans are putting in motion their politics- as- usual strategy of winning by any means necessary. One example includes automated phone calls warning people in urban areas that they will be arrested at the polls or that there polling places have moved. Other dirty tricks include:

·        In Virginia, word is being spread that Republicans vote on Tuesday, November 3 and Democrats on Wednesday, November 4, where the misinformed would arrive a day late and a dollar short. In addition, the registrar of elections for the area around Virginia Tech issued confusing messages to students inferring that their parents' tax status could be jeopardized based on vague state-board-of-elections guidelines.

·        In Ohio, Republicans have repeatedly gone to court to make public a list of more than 200,000 unmatched registrations, presumably so that those voters can be challenged at the polls, even though most of them are probably legit.  This summer, Time Magazine reports that the McCain campaign sent poorly designed absentee-ballot forms to more than 1 million voters in Ohio.

·        In Colorado, Republican secretary of state Mike Coffman, who is running for Congress, ruled that thousands of new registrations should be rejected because people failed to check a box before providing the last four digits of their Social Security number. The box was redundant, since new registrants provided all the other required information.

         Rick Wade, national director of African-American Outreach for the Obama Campaign warned, “Be vigilant and remember New Hampshire. In the primary election, the polls had us ahead there by double digits, but we lost.”  Campaign officials also reported that they have thousands of law students and lawyers working at the polls to stop voting suppression.

   In a recent conference call with Michelle Obama, she encouraged spiritual leaders to work and pray. She asked for 100 percent turnout from the African-American community and gave a special appeal to “ladies in the church because in the end women get it done.”              

    The best strategy is for Obama voters to overwhelm the system so that obstacles and dirty tricks will not cancel them out. This is no doubt on the minds of Stephanie Myers and E. Faye Williams, who all this year have been leading a get out the vote drive in the battleground state, Virginia.

     Myers, a Republican was assistant secretary of state for public affairs for the U.S. Health and Human Services Administration and Williams, an attorney, heads the National Political Congress of Black Women. Together they have organized a bi-partisan network that they believe will turn the tide in Virginia, as well as in other heated elections. Their organization is the Black Women for Obama, a spin-off the Obama Unity Network that is a network of Democrats, Republicans and independents started last spring.

     In an interview, Myers said, “the stakes are so high we had to mobilize across party lines because for African-Americans, we are talking about our very survival. As an example, she pointed out that since up to 70 percent of black families are headed by women, the sub-prime mortgage collapse means more families with children could become homeless.

    “McCain is supplying no answers, except to save the major corporations.  No attention is being paid to the Middle Class, she said.

     Experienced in political organizing, Myers said that the Obama Campaign is unique. “It is based on individuals and organizations taking charge of their own destiny. The official party structures are involved but not dominating. We have been organizing the beauty and barber shops.  Young people are taking leave from their universities to work in campaigns; elderly people in there seventies and eighties are registering. We have connected with the Ethiopians and Latinos and the white community, which is still the backbone…I have never seen anything like it.”

      The World awaits. Destiny is knocking. And I am still holding my breath, waiting to exhale.