On election night, photographer Matt Mendelsohn sat in front of his TV and said to his wife, "I can't believe I'm not making a picture of this day."
It's been seven years since Mendelsohn worked for a newspaper — his last gig was at USA Today — but his passion for documenting important moments in history did not expire with his press pass.
His frustration mounted as he sat in his living room in Arlington, Va., and watched as thousands of Americans poured into Chicago's Grant Park. There was Oprah, waiting, and Jesse Jackson, crying, and image after image of regular citizens who were determined to stake their own claims in this monumental moment in history.
The journalist in Mendelsohn was antsy, but it was the father in him that finally pushed him out the door.
"I used to cover things and think that someday I'd tell my daughter, 'Daddy covered that,'" he said. "But this time, I wanted to be able to tell her, 'Daddy was there.'"
About 11 p.m., Mendelsohn turned to his wife and said, "I've got to go out and shoot."
Mendelsohn knew better than to head for the White House.
"I knew I'd never find a parking space," he said, laughing.
He drove through the quiet streets, and then it hit him: Lincoln.
There will be a crowd at the Lincoln Memorial, he told himself. He raced to the memorial, parked far away and then lugged his cameras through the mist of rain. He approached a bored TV crew, who tried to warn him off.
"Nothing to see," one of them said.
Mendelsohn looked up toward the memorial and saw a small group of people gathered on the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. had given his "I Have a Dream" speech more than 40 years ago. Something was going on.
He walked up the steps and found 26 people huddled around a transistor radio.
"They stood there in the drizzling rain and just listened to Barack Obama's speech.
Some of them were sniffling because they were crying, but that was the only sound they made. You could hear the crowd a few blocks away outside the White House, but this group was absolutely silent."
Mendelsohn's photo of that moment appeared on The New York Times' op-ed page the next day, along with 200 words describing the scene. The photo was far too small on the page, but readers found it anyway. He has been deluged with e-mails from grateful Americans.
"I think they saw something in that little group of people," he said. "I think they saw themselves."
Here in Cleveland, one of my colleagues, Plain Dealer cartoonist Jeff Darcy, knows exactly what Mendelsohn means.
Like Mendelsohn, Darcy is 45, so he's just old enough to remember the images of a different America. When it was clear that Obama would win, Darcy also turned toward the Lincoln Memorial to tell the story of this election.
In his cartoon that ran last Wednesday, a tearful Abraham Lincoln extends his giant hand for a fist bump with President-elect Barack Obama.
Readers are still writing and calling.
"You expect a little response because people are emotionally primed," Darcy told me. "But I didn't expect this volume."
He described an elderly white man who was only able to leave part of his message. "I'm still reeling from everything that happened," the man said, "and then I saw your cartoon."
"That's all he got out," Darcy said. "He started to cry and hung up the phone."
When I asked Darcy why he thought so many readers responded with such emotion, he sounded a lot like Mendelsohn.
"I think they saw themselves in Lincoln," he said. "I think they saw who they wanted to be."
To see Mendelsohn's photograph: www.mattmendelsohn.net.
To see Darcy's cartoon: www.cleveland.com/darcy/index.ssf?/darcy/more/110508.html.
Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
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4 Comments | Post Comment
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Ma'am;... America has had plenty of feel bad moments, wars, assassinations, protest demonstrations with dogs and fire hoses and billy clubs... We have accounts of lynchings, and picture postcards and I, myself heard a story and shown a knife that killed two black men for letting the sun set on them in the wrong town, and from the nephew of the man who cut their throats... We need this moment like a drowning man needs a breath of air... If it is ever possible to put the past behind, it is with tangible actions that close a door to the past forever, and it only hurts me that more of us could not close that door, and deny to the past its power to move us and hurt us and remind us of our pain, our guilt...Do you see how time works, that in the life of a nation, four score and seven year, biblical life, nothing, and more nothing, and then, before the eyes of all, the terrible swift sword of the lord going snickersnack... What a windup... What was the hold up??? And Why the haste??? Do you see how long justice has been denied to this land in large ways and small??? Who hates the negroes now, but those who have always, those one step ahead, those with no one lower than except the black man??? People hate people in this land for the same reason they always have, because they think they can only have justice by denying justice...When we can find the courage to give the very justice we desire, and to give each one their due, and demand for each person their due, -then this moment of national joy and hope and demonstrated self goodness, of self inflicted satisfaction, -that we need even if we do not deserve -will be ours forever... I hope Mr. Obama is as smart and as able as he seems... I hope he is untouchable, and that he pushes forward, with us close behind... I hope he says he is not a symbol, and not an angel, but a man making a sacrifice of his life on the altar of national unity... I hope it is only time... I hope he survives his devotion, and lives to write his memoirs... I see black children today, and I am happy for them, and I must admit I have never been happy for them, but have always pitied them... What a terrible insult is pity... What a helpless commentary on the vices of fate... You die, and I pity... I die, and I pity... You are born black, and I pity. Screw pity... How can we bear pity for our countrymen for bearing the injustice of our countrymen??? Isn't pity our indictment??? Isn't pity our silver for betrayal??? What more can I say, than that Hope prays our days of greed and grief and pain are behind us, or nearly so, and our days of justice and unity are before us....Thanks...Sweeney
Comment: #1
Posted by: James A, Sweeney
Sun Nov 9, 2008 7:15 PM
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Does Ms. Schultz know that President Lincoln freed only the slaves in Southern states? Northern slaveholders (and there were many) did not have to emancipate their slaves. It was done as a punitive measure, not an enlightened social or moral act. Though an intersting man in many ways, Lincoln was not quite the saint liberals would have us believe.
Comment: #2
Posted by: ashir
Mon Nov 10, 2008 2:50 PM
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Does Ms. Schultz know that President Lincoln freed only the slaves in Southern states? Northern slaveholders (and there were many) did not have to emancipate their slaves. It was done as a punitive measure, not an enlightened social or moral act. Though an intersting man in many ways, Lincoln was not quite the saint liberals would have us believe.
Comment: #3
Posted by: ashir
Mon Nov 10, 2008 2:58 PM
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Re: ashir;... Sir/ma'am, whatever... I have read extensively on Lincoln, and I will be happy to testify to you that the man was in touch with all the implications of slavery, and he was not alone, as many people in the North understood how far the South lagged behind the North economically, and to what extent slave labor endangered free labor... That fact did not make dear the black man to the white... No one wanted perfect equality with black people. But, as Lincoln noted: the South is not a place for poor white men to remove to, but to remove from... If white people in the South had any ambition they moved North, as many did to Southern Illinois, Indiana, and further West. The fact is that Slavery dishonored labor, so that no white would lift a finger to improve their own condition which was being totally debased by slave labor... I went into the building trades at nearly the same point where affirmative action was bring blacks in, but after the civil war there were more black construction workers than white, because plantations were self sufficient, needing blacksmithing and masons and carpenters... It was the whites who did not know how to work, as Nathan Bedford Forrest found in the railroad business, that a white man would kill a black man for a job he would not do...Before the republicans began to come into their own, it was they who were talking secession... They said something of the South we should remember today, That bad morals equal bad roads... In every single economic indicator from libraries, and schools, to literacy, to income, to miles of roads,and etc., per capita, the South lagged far behind the North. Add to this the fact, that Sold down the River as in the Song, Oh Suzanna, a slave had a life expectancy of under ten years, and his replacement price set the price of Cotton... Lincoln was one of the most morally sensitive men in his day, but what dictated his moves was always political considerations... He never liked Slavery; but his respect for law was such that he knew he could not legally end it, unless it cooperated by commiting suicide. If you go back, and read some of his letters you see this was a point of contention between him, and his best friend, Speed. The guy really was smart, and he really boxed Douglas's ears on the issue, and orchestrated his defeat in the presidential run... No man was better for the Job...And he would never have had it if the Democrats had not let him divide them... And, for their part, they had everything going their way, so that like us, in Iraq, they began fighting an enemy they did not have only to find an enemy they did not want...Thanks...Sweeney
Comment: #4
Posted by: James A, Sweeney
Mon Nov 10, 2008 8:51 PM
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