Cleveland: Where hope has wrestled with fear

Reporting from Cleveland - I could not have imagined that less than four years later, he would be elected president.

His name was so unfamiliar, I kept stumbling over it during our 45-minute interview about the role of race in his life and in his politics. Was it Barack Obama or Obama Barack?

The next morning, unbidden, he called me back.

"Hey Sandy," he said. "This is Barack. I've been thinking about what we talked about, and I wanted to add some thoughts."

By the time we finished our second chat, there were two things I thought I knew:

Barack Obama was determined to force this country to confront its "legacy of slavery."

And what he was asking -- and offering -- was too much for a nation still bitterly divided by skin color.

"His candidacy would make this country squirm and shudder and maybe even come unglued," I wrote back then.

Clearly, I underestimated him -- and us.

How could I have been so wrong? As Obama closed in on the presidency, I went back to my hometown to look for answers.

d

Cleveland was a step up for my parents. My father's family fled Georgia in the 1920s, one step ahead of a lynch mob set on teaching my uncle a lesson for daring to sass a white man. Twenty years later, my mother led her siblings north from a farm in Alabama. She met my father in Cleveland. They married, and I was the oldest of their four children.

When I grew up in the 1960s, the city was so segregated -- blacks on the east side, whites on the west -- it might as well have been the Deep South. In my 25 years in Cleveland, the only time I remember crossing the Cuyahoga River was on a school bus for a field trip to the zoo.

Our family chased the American dream: good schools, a safe neighborhood, financial security. But when we moved up to a bigger home on a nicer block, the white neighbors around us began to move out.

Most of my classmates at Miles Elementary were the children of immigrants from the east side's ethnic enclaves: Migliore, Slivka, Trankito, Kowalski, Milovich, McFarland, Manzo. By the time I reached John F. Kennedy High, their families had scattered. My 1972 graduating class had 900 students, all but four of them black.

I left for California in 1979, and tracked Cleveland's changes on trips back to visit my sisters. Twenty years later, drug addiction and joblessness had taken such a toll on my once-comfortable neighborhood that Domino's refused to deliver a pizza to my family home. Its drivers had been robbed once too often.

On this most recent trip, on the eve of the election, I was trying to understand what an Obama presidency might signify and what it took for America to reach this point.

I found a city eager to buy the hope Obama was selling, yet wrestling with generations-old grudges and fears.

"When you live in a segregated city like Cleveland, where the city is divided east-west, black-white, you can't help but be suspicious, even fearful, of each other," Anna Kormos told me as we sat on the front porch of her childhood home on Cleveland's west side, a Hillary Clinton campaign sign still in her frontyard.

She wasn't sure then who she'd vote for. "I was raised as a die-hard Democrat," she said. But she found Obama a little too stage-managed, bordering on arrogant, and too much of an unknown entity. And she was beyond disappointed that he hadn't picked Clinton as his running mate.