Witness to history: Videos

King Harvey, 73

Mother and daughter: Geneva Ogden, 77, and Mary Hines, 101

Perneller Chubb-Wilson, 75

Alphonzo Holland, 92

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Mary Hines grew up in Pittsylvania County, where she enjoyed most of the opportunities rural Virginia afforded a young black woman in the early 20th century — a sixth-grade education, marriage by age 21, and a career path that took her from cooking and cleaning for white families in Roanoke to mopping the floors of local factories.

But in October, this 101-year-old woman, whose mind is still sharp and who can still get around the house on her own with a walker, did something extraordinary. She filled out and mailed a write-in ballot for the first black major party nominee for president in American history.

Did she ever believe she would live long enough to see a black man become president?

"No," she said. "No way."

She was wrong, of course, and on Tuesday at noon she will watch Barack Obama sworn in as this nation's 44th president. She will watch the inauguration on television at the home of her 77-year-old daughter, Geneva Ogden, where Hines also lives. Ogden never believed she would see this day, either.

"No," she said. "Not in a heartbeat."

They are not alone. Several older black Roanokers said that they figured a black person could win the White House — someday, long after they were gone, certainly.

Looking back at their life experiences, it's easy to see why they doubted. Everyone interviewed for this story remembers segregation. Most recalled a time when they could not eat in Roanoke restaurants or ride in the front seats of city buses and streetcars.

"It was different," said Hines, whose 102nd birthday is May 1. "At five-and-dimes you didn't go in and eat. You had to take it out and eat."

Ogden, her daughter, never liked that idea.

"I would go downtown on Saturday, and I remember Grant's sold hot dogs, but you couldn't stay and eat them," she said. "I said, 'I'm not going to buy anything I can't sit down and eat.' "

Ogden, who worked as a nurse at Burrell Memorial Hospital and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center , was born in West Virginia, where her father was a coal miner and where her mother was a self-described housewife. The family moved to Roanoke in the 1940s, where Hines got a job sweeping rayon yarn remnants and cleaning the floors and bathrooms at the American Viscose plant.

"It was hard work," Hines recalled . "I scrubbed areas as large as an auditorium. It would take two weeks."

After American Viscose shut down in 1958, Hines cleaned offices at Peoples Federal Savings and Loan .

"There were no opportunities to go back to school for elderly people," her daughters-aid. "If you didn't get an education when you where younger, you had no opportunities."

Still, Hines lived long enough to watch her daughter, four grandchildren, 10 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren grow up in a country that would one day elect a black president.

"This is something new," she said. "I thought it could never happen. God must have had a hand in that."

'Long overdue'

When Alphonzo "A.L." Holland Sr. returned from World War II, the former army combat engineer came back to a hometown where he was still expected to ride in the backs of city buses and streetcars.

"I've had a lot of doors shut in my face," said Holland, 92, who served in the Philippines. Repeatedly, employers and government leaders told the war veteran "you can't do this, you can't do that."

Holland became a leader who helped change Roanoke during the civil rights movement. As president of the local NAACP in the 1970s, Holland and a group of ministers, which included former Roanoke NAACP president R.R. Wilkinson, helped desegregate lunch counters in downtown Roanoke through brazen means: They simply walked in the front door and ordered lunch.

One by one, the old department stores and five-and-dimes that lined Campbell Avenue integrated. Holland sipped coffee in the tea room at Miller & Rhoads . He ate lunch at Kress and Woolworth's. Slowly, inexorably, Roanoke changed. So did the country.

By the mid-1960s, Holland, who heeded Martin Luther King Jr.'s call to go to Selma, Ala., in 1965 and march with civil rights activists, no longer had to pay a $2.50 "habitation tax" or pass a literacy test in order to vote. In 1975, Noel Taylor became Roanoke's first (and only) black mayor, one of the first black mayors in Virginia. He served as mayor for 17 years.

Holland said he always believed that a black man would one day be elected president. He is old enough to remember when Herbert Hoover defeated Al Smith in 1928, back when Smith's Catholicism prevented some Americans for voting for him. After John F. Kennedy, another Catholic, was elected in 1960, Holland realized that one barrier to the presidency had been eliminated. Perhaps someday, he thought, a man's race won't prevent him from reaching the nation's highest office.

"It's long overdue," Holland said of the election of America's first black president. "Frederick Douglass had leadership abilities. Dr. Dan Hale Williams [a heart surgery pioneer] had leadership abilities. God didn't put all the brains in one person's head. Everybody's got a little bit."

As for those sad old days spent moving to the back of the bus, they are nothing but a bad memory and a perfect metaphor.

"I grew up riding in the back of the bus," he said. "Now I see people my color driving the bus. I'm living the American dream."

'I couldn't speak'

Perneller Chubb-Wilson, 75, was not one who believed she would see a black president in her lifetime. She didn't believe it even after she met Barack Obama.

Chubb-Wilson, co-founder and chairwoman emeritus of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference chapter in Roanoke, shook Obama's hand after he addressed the conference's national gathering in Atlanta in August 2007, six months after he began his campaign. She also met Michelle Obama after the speech.

"I was with a 92-year-old friend who told Michelle, 'Don't you think anything of it, but I've got to get a hug from your husband because I never thought I'd live to see this day,' " Chubb-Wilson said. "I didn't believe I would, either."

Chubb-Wilson is a former nurse and a self-described "rabble-rouser" who has participated in her share of controversial issues. The Roanoke leadership conference chapter fought for years to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with a street or park renamed in his honor. Finally, city officials decided to rename the renovated First Street bridge for King (First Street was once called Henry Street, a major thoroughfare of commerce and entertainment in Roanoke's black Gainsboro neighborhood). A bronze statue of King overlooks the street.

Like many of the people interviewed for this story, Chubb-Wilson is a devout Christian who believes God's work was apparent in the election. She said she prays daily for the president-elect.

"There are over 800 hate groups in this country," she said. "I pray that nothing happens to him."

Chubb-Wilson, who has two tickets to the inauguration, said that she cried her way through a local television interview as she watched a number of former red Republican states turn Democratic blue.

"I couldn't speak," she said. "Tears were flowing with joy. I couldn't believe it. People weren't voting for color, they were voting for the best-qualified person. I always hoped that if there was going to be a black president, he'd have the qualifications Barack Obama has. He knows ethics, morals, the legal obligation to his country, and he has the knowledge skills to be president of the United States. I'm so proud of him. Not because he's black, but because he's so well-qualified."

Her only regret is that others in her family are not here to share her joy.

"I wish my mother and father were here to see this day," she said. "My mother said there'd never be a black president. My grandmother — that's her picture on the wall — she wouldn't believe it, either."

'A matter of time'

King Harvey, 73, grew up in a West Virginia coal camp that was as segregated as most American cities and towns in the 1930s and '40s. There were times in the camp, however, when the color of a man's skin didn't matter — when that skin was covered with black coal dust.

"When the men came out of the mines, they all looked the same," Harvey said. "They looked different when they went in, but they all looked the same when they came out."

Harvey grew up and played sports with plenty of white children, but he was not allowed to attend school with them. He remembered going to get ice cream with his white buddies, only to have to enter the building through a different door than his friends. He couldn't even eat his ice cream with his pals.

"There was a little wooden fence that ran from the counter to the wall," he said. "We'd eat our ice cream side by side, separated by that little fence. Then we'd walk out our different doors and go down the street together."

Young people tend to view race relations differently than their elders, he said. He believed that made a difference in the 2008 election.

Obama "tapped into that corps of young people," he said as he relaxed in his lovely North Roanoke County home. "Young people don't look at race the way we did. They look at 'What do you stand for?' "

Harvey said he thought a black man would one day take the oath of office, but that he wouldn't be around to see it.

"I thought it would happen, it was a matter of time," he said. "I've seen the evolution of things happening here in America. I felt it would not happen in my lifetime. … I didn't think Barack would be that person. Then I learned how he came up and came through. God let us know that it was possible.

Harvey and his wife retired to Roanoke County in 1992 following his 30-plus years as a regional analyst for the Internal Revenue Service in New York. Dressed in sweat shirt and sweat pants, Harvey looks like the former college football player he was at Bluefield State. He also served a stint in the U.S. Army in the 1950s, right after the Korean War.

In fact, he got to see some Korean War vets in action back home in West Virginia. Several black veterans returned to the coal camp and tore down that little wooden fence in the ice cream shop where Harvey was separated from his white friends.

"They told the owner that they had served their country," he recalled. "And the owner let them tear that fence down."