Residents astounded, ecstatic about Obama's election victory
By Melissa Merli
Sunday November 9, 2008
Heather Coit
Despite his T-shirt, which was a gift from his girlfriend, University of Illinois associate Professor and comics artist/scholar John Jennings does not consider Barack Obama a messiah or Superman. But he views Obama's election to the presidency as a monumental shift for the country, one that has Jennings feeling reborn.
John Jennings cast the first vote in his Champaign precinct Tuesday, and he surprised himself by how emotional he'd felt.
"I was thinking about my grandparents and how I came up in Mississippi in this rural, painfully impoverished fashion," he said. "My grandparents were illiterate – they couldn't even have read a ballot – and I'm about to vote for the first African-American president.
"It moved me to tears."
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