New Haven Independent

Esdaile (on left in photo with activist Henry Fernandez) and other NAACP officials threw a post-election party at the Crown Street club Tuesday night to thank the some 600 volunteers who have been working statewide for a year to register voters for Obama. In doing so, they look ahead at what a watershed moment in civil rights history will mean for the country’s oldest civil-rights organization.

“The point,” Esdaile said, “is that these people, many of them young, will get energized to stay civically involved.”

The state NAACP has 10,000 members, Esdaile said. New Haven chapter is New England’s largest, with 1,200 member.

On a personal level, Esdaile said he was shaking when he voted in Hamden, the moment was so historic. “Why? Because my parents fought for the right to vote, and here I am voting for the first black president.”

To Clifton Graves, chair of the local chapter’s political action committee, Obama’s evident victory was both sweet and inspirational. (On the far right, beside his son Malik and the local NAACP’s first veep, Dori Dumas)As a sociologist, who teaches at Gateway Community College, Graves said he felt that Obama was standing on the shoulders not only of marquee names in the civil rights chronicle, from Frederick Douglas to Douglas Wlder, but on the shoulders of the nameless thousands.

Then striking the same theme as Esdaile, he said, “Obama can only do so much on the national level. The NAACP is still needed big time to work on housing, education, health care.”

Malik Graves, Clifford’s son, put it succinctly and generationally. “You guys are half done with your lives,” he said to a reporter his father’s age. “And we’re left with all this mess. I know so many people I go to school with at Gateway who are so smart, but they can’t afford another school.”

Graves said the NAACP plans no specific initiatives apart from the ongoing in the aftermath of the Obama victory. He cited a recent conference on racial disparities in criminal justice convened in New Britain two weeks ago. Six hundred attended, people of all backgrounds, under the state’s new commission on racial disparities in health care, which the NAACP helped create. “And you know what? Obama’s name was mentioned a couple of times. The work is for us to do.”

Esdaile predicted Obama and a reform agenda will need 16 years to undo the Bush mess. “I think he should pick small fruit from the tree in the first term, and then we’ll see.”

While the pride was everywhere evident at the NAACP party, Esdaile said the group expects no special nod to the Afrian-American community from Obama. “He ran on a not particularly black agenda,” he said, “but an agenda that things get better for everyone. That’s as it should be.”

On the streets of New Haven, Esdaile concluded, change will come, but slowly. “I predict that with all the new young voters in town, there will be more minority people running for office. And there will also be a challenge to [New Haven Mayor] John DeStefano. Yes indeed. I sense it brewing.”