Is hope still alive?

From Griffith REVIEW Postscripts
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

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by Melody L Fuller

Melody L Fuller’s biography and other articles by this writer

AFTER ‘Going to Washington DC: Crying for Oscar Grant III’ was published, I learned more about how the issues and challenges of writing about and discussing the nuances of race, class, an inauguration and an execution could pull people as closely together as those factors and events have pushed people in America apart.

In the same week the piece was published I learned that a childhood friend of Oscar Grant was murdered. The coincidence of timing amplified the magnitude and gravity of Johntue Caldwell’s death. I was not in California when I got the distressing news, so all I could do was search online for accounts of what may have happened. To date the information available is not consistent, so once again, I pray and hope for justice for the death of yet another young man.

At the time I was on Martha’s Vineyard working on my writing and vacationing.

Martha’s Vineyard is President Barack Obama’s choice for his family summer vacation. I have been fortunate to be on The Vineyard during two of his visits over the past three years. This year I was blessed to meet him, Malia, and Sasha at a bookstore in Vineyard Haven.

The experience was surreal. The President’s secret service agents invited twenty-five people to meet him. I chatted with Malia and Sasha Obama, who are as delightful and engaging as they appear from afar.

When I met President Barack Obama, we spoke for a good half-minute. We shook hands and I told him that I was Melody Fuller from Oakland, California. He said that it was nice to meet me: ‘Melody Fuller from Oakland, California.’ We talked briefly about the summer, our hands clasped once more and we exchanged big smiles.

Days before I met President Barack Obama, I had the pleasure of meeting the esteemed Dr Charles Ogletree, a close friend and trusted advisor to the President. He taught both Michelle and Barack. In addition to being a professor of law at Harvard University, Dr Ogletree is director of the Charles Hamilton Institute for Race and Justice. Dr Ogletree invited me to join a panel with him to discuss ‘Going to Washington DC’. The panel followed a viewing of a film that addressed Professor Ogletree’s book, The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America. This was an honor and Professor Ogletree expressed his interest in working with me to get my publication before more audiences.

‘Going to Washington DC’ has reached a good number of readers and the response has been very good and joyously overwhelming at times.

ABC (American) Radio invited me to be a guest on its live morning broadcast in Los Angeles, to discuss the piece; they also wanted my reaction to meeting the President. We also discussed Hurricane Irene, which was bearing down creating urgent breaking news, which kept my interview off-air. Nonetheless it was exciting and validating to have media seek me out.

East Coast colleagues teased me that I had nothing to be concerned about from Irene, coming from the state that has frequent earthquakes, large urban fires, and regular riots. Laughing, I countered that a hurricane would top all that, I was terrified by the way the wind howled, the skies turned from bright summer blue to the pitch of a winter night.

Safely back in California I met again with Cephus Johnson, Oscar Grant’s uncle. I met him in July and we stayed in touch this summer. It has been comforting to work with him on getting the publication to a wider audience and to talk strategically about future steps. Interviews with KPOO and KPFA radio stations are in the works as well as other exciting and hopefully far reaching literary and community efforts.

19 September, 2011

None of this would have been possible without Griffith REVIEW, and I am eternally grateful for the opportunity given to me and the relationships formed that I hope will last for a long time.