Lorraine Martin of Port Angeles will carry an old quilt to the Capitol Mall to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama on Jan. 20.
The quilt was made by her great-grandmother, who was born a slave.
“I’m going to wrap it around me,” she said on Friday.
“It’s taking a bit of her spirit, a bit of her hope.”
She and her husband, LeRoy Martin — who retired as president, general manager and owner of the Port Angeles Ford, Lincoln Mercury dealership in 2006 — are among five people from Clallam County who will be in Washington, D.C., for the swearing in of the country’s first black president.
A Neah Bay grandmother and her husband, Julie and Ron Johnson, and a Port Angeles social worker, Marcia Farrell, who recalls bricks thrown at her as she did volunteer civil rights work in Chicago decades ago, also will travel to see the new president sworn in.
“It’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” Farrell said.
“In 1963, I begged my parents to allow me to go to the Freedom March” and see Martin Luther King Jr. speak, but at 17, she was too young, she said.
“This kind of makes up for it,” the 62-year-old Port Angeles resident said on Friday, pointing out that, although she didn’t get to see the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, she will see the ‘New Birth of Freedom’ speech.
Julie Johnson, who will admit only to being “over 50,” was the first American Indian woman to represent Clallam County at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last year.
“Not the first American Indian, the first American Indian woman,” she emphasized.
Johnson was a delegate for Hillary Clinton, but now, “I support Obama 110 percent.”
The Johnsons and the Martins will be among the 200,000 in the reserved section of Capitol Mall during the ceremony swearing in Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
Both couples were supplied with “VIP passes” by the office of Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Belfair.
Farrell doesn’t have a ticket for the reserved section, but she is looking forward to “being part of that energized crowd of several million people.”
Martins
“This is the first time we’ve had an African-American [president],” LeRoy Martin said. “No one thought that would happen, or at least not for another 100 years.”
Obama was elected, he believes, because “people were looking for major change in this country. A lot of people are longing for the hope he brings, whether you’re black, red, white or green.
“The election just confirmed the promise of this country, that this country was founded on liberty, equality and brotherhood.”
Neither of the Martins have attended an inauguration before.
Lorraine Martin, an Obama delegate to the Washington state Democratic Convention last year, said they felt it important to attend this ceremony — “to fulfill a dream, to affirm all the hope of generations, to see that it’s being realized, to be there when a new American history is being written.”
Said LeRoy Martin: “It’s quite significant. This country is 220 years old, the longest Republic form of government in the history of the world.”
The presidential inauguration “is a peaceful symbol of transition that world is just in awe of.”
Lorraine Martin said that the couple asked Dicks for tickets when they saw him at a fundraiser in Port Angeles in October because they were sure Obama was going to win.
The election, she added, “wasn’t about race.”
“The hearts and minds of Americans are changing,” she said. “When everything you could think of was thrown out there in the campaign, people wanted a change.
“That speaks volumes about the intelligence of the American voters.”
The Martins have two children, one of whom, their daughter, Victoria, who lives in Los Angeles, Calif., “made hundreds of phone calls” for Obama.
“She was only a small microcosm of ‘Yes, you will be listened to. Yes, you are important. Yes, you can effect change. It’s that thrilling thing that just went out all over.”
The Martins, Johnsons and Farrell will fly to the East Coast next weekend.
Johnsons
Before Johnson leaves the East Coast on Jan. 22, she plans to meet with Dicks, who represents the 6th Congressional District — as well as Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Mountlake Terrace, and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Freeland.
Farrell said she would also attend those meetings.
“I want to ask them how we, as a team working together, can improve services in Clallam County,” whether in terms of health care, economic development or other issues, Johnson said.
Before she returns to Neah Bay, she will attend a state central committee Democratic meeting on Jan. 24 and 25 in Olympia as a committee woman, elected during county party reorganization on Dec. 6.
Upon her return to Neah Bay, Johnson wants to work on the county level.
“I’m proposing a couple of listening sessions” in communities all over the county, “so we can tell our representatives what our needs are.”
She and her husband have two sons, Dwayne Johnson of Port Angeles and Ron Johnson Jr., of Shelton.
Farrell
Farrell, who was elected on Dec. 6 as the recording secretary for the Clallam County Democratic Central Committee, said that Obama “will be our saving grace.”
She volunteered for Obama’s campaign, helping with voter registration, door-to-door canvassing, organizing parades. Going to Washingotn, D.C., “was a reward to myself.”
Farrell, a three-year resident of Port Angeles who works as a vocational rehabilitation counselor for the state Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, was active in the civil rights movement from an early age, she said.
When she was 20, she spent a summer in Chicago working a summer YMCA job on the south side.
She volunteered for work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference open housing effort, led by King, and for Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket, she said.
“It was a segregated city at that time,” she said. “Throughout that summer, there was an effort to desegregate communities, marches, demonstrations.”
Her experience “was terrifying at times. We were confronted by the KKK and the American Nazi Party. We had bricks thrown at us. It was really pretty harrowing.
“It shaped my life, because of seeing how ugly discrimination, segregation is.”
She is married to Michael Farrell — also a Democrat, but not a traveler — and has a stepdaughter and a grandson.
High hopes
All have high hopes for change for the better during an Obama administration.
“He will put the country in a new direction,” LeRoy Martin said.
“We need to make things better for the common good.
“Obama has been able to project that message over and over again, that this country was founded on the common good.
“You have the freedom to become whatever you want, but you have to think about it in the context of what gifts you’ve been given by this country.”
In Jefferson County, Tom Chambers, Dorothy Hollenbeck, Lori Macklin, Mark Saran, John Collins, Kate Franco and Claire Roney, all of Port Townsend, will attend the ceremony, according to the Jefferson County Democratic Party.
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Managing Editor Leah Leach can be reached at 360-417-3531 or leah.leach@peninsuladailynews.com.
