Neighborhood says its vote goes beyond race

Black residents support Obama based on issues

CINCINNATI - Charlie Wiley first pulled into Cincinnati in the 1940s on the Humming Bird passenger train from Alabama. He was about 6 years old. He came north so his father could work on the railroad.

Ever since, Wiley, 65, has lived around Over-the-Rhine, a historically German neighborhood that is now one of the city's best-known black neighborhoods. He worked in construction, at laundries, in factories. One of his first jobs was resetting bowling pins in a local bowling alley, before they made machines to do that.

Today, he doesn't get along so well. He's a diabetic, and he has arthritis. He comes to the local food bank sometimes, which is where we found him yesterday, waiting his turn in a blue-and-gray Negro Leagues baseball cap.

"I ran short this month," he said.

He'll be back at Thanksgiving and Christmas, for turkeys.

Then we started talking about the presidential election, and a warm, broad grin spread across his face. Like so many others in this struggling neighborhood just north of downtown, he can't believe his eyes, can't believe an African-American candidate might be the next president of the United States.

"I never thought in my lifetime," he said. "Especially if he wins," he continued, referring to Barack Obama.

Wiley said he has lived long enough to see it.

But pride is pride, he explained, and voting is voting. He is not backing Obama because he's black; he believes the Illinois senator is the right candidate - especially when it comes to fixing healthcare.

It's a distinction many voters in Over-the-Rhine make: They are deeply proud - beside-themselves proud, over-the-moon proud, too-good-to-be-true proud - of Obama and how far he has come. But they are not voting on skin color.

"People want to say Obama's just speaking to the black race," said Marcus Prophett, 29, who works as commercial janitor and lives nearby. "He's speaking to everyone. He's speaking to everybody who's struggling."

Count Prophett among them. He makes minimum wage. His right foot is in an air cast because he tore a ligament a few months ago. He was told surgery would cost $12,000, but his insurance only covers $2,000.

"Isn't that crazy?" Prophett said.

All he wants, he said, is for healthcare costs to be "reasonable," and for opportunity to return to places like Over-the-Rhine.

"Everybody out here doesn't need welfare," he said. "We need jobs. Better housing."

People are "hungry right now," added Darrell Warner Jr., 27, who works as a nightclub bouncer.

They believe Obama will provide help.

"You have a right to vote," Prophett said. "Not for us; for them."

He pointed down the street, to Warner's 1-year-old son sitting in a stroller.

"One vote could change a whole lot," Prophett said.

There's a lot to change in Over-the-Rhine, so named because the German workers who once crossed the Erie Canal on the way to work called the canal the Rhine, after the German river, as a little reminder of home.

My colleague Dina's grandmother, Jane Jansak, was a longtime social worker, church-goer, and good Samaritan in this neighborhood, and she saw it slowly transition from white to black - building by building, as she explained. Jansak helped start the food bank, which they called the "Free Store" back then, along with a city dump employee named Frank Gerson, who used to take discarded items and give them to the needy.

Today, Over-the-Rhine struggles with joblessness, crime, and drugs. Several voters, in explaining the lack of economic opportunity, said violence and theft were rampant.

But while the voters we talked to earlier in the week in rural Ohio expressed a sense of hopelessness, people here told us they still had faith. Things aren't necessarily less bleak on these city streets, but there is hope that Obama's policies might, if he wins, help them. Might change things.

"I like what he's going to do for the city," said Shreey McDay, a 28-year-old who processes checks for the Internal Revenue Service and lives in Westwood, a nearby neighborhood. "We need jobs."

Black voters were adamant, though, that they like Obama because he's for the right things, not because he is also black.

"You gotta go past the color," said Ronald English, 54, an artist who volunteers for an antihomeless coalition. "Our blood is red."

"It's not about color," added Lillian Jones, 70, from the nearby neighborhood of North Avondale. "It's about what they're going to do for the world."

Wiley can hardly wait for Obama to get started.

"On the 4th, I'll be right there, waiting to vote," he said. "That might be the vote that wins."

After he votes, Wiley will come home, turn on the TV, and settle in, hoping to be a witness to history.

"I'm going to stay up all night," he said. "Just like I did with Kennedy."

Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com. Dina Rudick can be reached at drudick@globe.com.