Dear President Obama: A one-of-a-kind hope
By Peachy Myers
I was one of your original organizers. We met for the first time in South Carolina, back when you had less than 10% name recognition. As your time in the White House draws to an end, I’m writing to let you know that uprooting my life and devoting nearly three years to your vision of America and the change we knew was possible is the best thing I’ve ever done. Thank you for giving me — and countless others — the opportunity to accompany you on this extraordinary journey.
For me, the beginning came on a bright spring day in 2007 as I waited nervously for my dad to respond to the grand pronouncement I’d just made over the phone: I would be taking a leave of absence from graduate school to join the unlikely presidential campaign of a first-term Senator from Illinois. I held my breath, waiting for all the unanswerable questions I knew he was about to ask. Where would I go? How would I get in? When would I return to UT? But, after just a few beats, he surprised me by saying, “Well, Peachy, you’ve always made decisions from the heart. And they’ve worked out for you. I trust that this one will too.” Phew! At 29 years old I certainly didn’t need his permission to veer off path (again), but I did want his blessing.
Or maybe the beginning was that Saturday morning in February when you announced your candidacy. My mom and sister were in town and snapped a picture of me toasting the TV screen with a glass of champagne at 10am, tears streaming down my face.
If I’m honest, though, the beginning was in November 2004. I’d just spent the last six months working 18 hours a day, 7 days a week to make sure George W Bush wouldn’t be re-elected. When I returned, defeated, to my previous job as a homeless service provider in San Francisco, a colleague asked if I’d ever drop everything again to join another presidential campaign. No way, I said. But then I clearly remember spinning around in my chair and taking it back: “I’ll never do it again. Unless that guy Barack Obama decides to run. Such a long shot. But did you see his convention speech?!?”
So the beginning must have been that night you introduced yourself to America, and to me. I watched your story unfold from a rowdy labor hall in St. Louis and felt the kind of hope that only comes once in a lifetime.
You see, I’d been waiting a long time for someone to step onto the national stage and embody the kind of change I could believe in. As a Sociology major at Vanderbilt, I pondered all sorts of academic questions about inequality — from the comfort of the classroom. As an Ingram Scholar I also got to learn up close the devastating consequences of dreams long deferred. This was in the 1990's. I spent my summers and spring breaks in Cabrini Green, Chicago, where I worked with fellow students and local community leaders to create a youth leadership program. Just a few months before I arrived, a 9-year-old girl, known as Little Girl X, was found in a dark stairwell of her high rise apartment building, brutally assaulted and left for dead by a gang member. As I came to know and love Little Girl X’s friends during an intense time of grief I also came to realize that if they were ever to have a fighting chance at life, they’d have to overcome a whole lot of obstacles — obstacles put in their way by design for over two centuries, obstacles that I certainly never faced: the daily threat of violence, extreme poverty, failing schools, zero access to decent housing in safe neighborhoods, a city (indeed, a whole nation) that they knew had turned its back on them. They had already absorbed in their heart of hearts, at such a young age, the message that their lives didn’t matter.
That’s when I decided I wanted to spend my life finding ways to stand with them in solidarity. In order to become a better ally, I studied the Civil Rights Movement and knelt in Medgar Evers’s driveway, where he was shot in front of his family; I peeked into the old church in Neshoba County, Mississippi where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had set up a Freedom School before they were killed for registering black people to vote; I touched the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, where peaceful marchers were attacked by armed police; I visited Central High in Little Rock, where 9 black students bravely claimed their right to an equal education; I said a prayer at 16th Street Baptist in Birmingham. These places deeply moved me and made me marvel at the bravery and power of ordinary people — black and white — who had come together and organized for change during those days.
Your race for the White House gave me and my generation the opportunity to roll up our sleeves and alter history. I leaped at the chance and made my way as fast as I could to South Carolina, where black voters would have a say for the first time early in the Democratic nomination process. After a long, hard-fought, whopping victory there (when David Plouffe told us we’d hung the moon and you joined us for our “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” celebration), I moved from primary state to primary state as part of your field leadership team, then got to run Missouri — my beloved home and fierce general election battleground state. On the night of November 4, 2008, right after we’d won, I called my dad from our boiler room. He was serving as an election protection lawyer and when he picked up from the courthouse, I couldn’t hear him on the other end of the line. Dad? Quiet. Then the sound of tears.
I arrived in Washington not long after, all nerves and wonder and hope. It was my privilege to serve as the White House Liaison to the Corporation for National and Community Service and launch the United We Serve initiative during your first year in office. I did so with great pride. But just a few months in, I got a call with the news that my dad had been in a bicycle accident.
He didn’t make it.
This was only two weeks before he was supposed to move to DC. He’d been selected to spend a year at the State Department as a Franklin Fellow. He was so excited to work for your administration and to go bowling at the White House with me.
That moment changed everything. I left DC sooner than expected, walked across Spain, mapped out an epic cross-country road trip that led me to some of our most majestic national parks (turns out wild spaces are the best places to grieve), then returned to Austin to finish my degree at the LBJ School of Public Affairs — where I crossed the same stage you and John Lewis shared three years later on the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.
The work I do now brings me full circle. I’m the Director of Community Engagement at a nonprofit (foundcom.org) that builds national-award-winning affordable housing with on-site education, financial stability, and health programs for our residents. We’re integrating neighborhoods all over Austin and giving kids like the kids I knew in Cabrini Green a safe place to grow up with all sorts of opportunities to fulfill their God given potential. We’re righting some historic wrongs. And I get to spend my days inviting big-hearted, forward-thinking community members to participate in our work in meaningful ways. I’ve carried so many lessons from your campaign here with me. Two recent examples: When voters rejected a $55M affordable housing bond package in 2012, we assembled a small group of Obama alums to run a real campaign the following year. Their efforts to organize local volunteers, go door-to-door, and GOTV garnered 60% of the vote! I’m also super excited that we recently trained our first crop of Neighborhood Team Leaders to pilot the same sort of neighborhood team model that we developed so successfully on your campaign in South Carolina. Their task is to reach out to folks who live, work, and worship nearby and ask them to welcome and support their neighbors — the families with kids, low-wage workers, formerly homeless veterans, people with disabilities, and seniors who live with us.
Looking all the way back, I know deep in my bones that the real beginning to this winding story was when my parents instilled in me the deep seated belief that I could be bold and brave and take big leaps of faith, that I could dare to leave the world a little brighter than it was before I happened by. Your girls surely know what I mean.
Following my heart to work for you and create change at the highest level has been, without a doubt, the greatest honor of my life. I’m more grateful than you’ll ever know and I look forward to all that’s yet to come in your post-presidency. As my dad would say, our buttons are bursting.
