Hundreds of Denver Residents in Historic African American Five Points Neighborhood Gather to Watch Obama Speech

AMY GOODMAN: While Barack Obama spoke before over 84,000 people, many residents of Denver gathered elsewhere in the city to watch his speech. In the historic African American neighborhood of Five Points, where Free Speech TV is based, where we’re broadcasting from, hundreds converged to watch a live telecast in a tent set up by the organizer, the Denver Jazz & Blues Festival. Democracy Now! was there with Nicole Salazar, asking people on the scene what they felt.

OBAMA SUPPORTER 1: This night is a historic event for me. And I really didn’t want to go down to the stadium. I wanted to come down in the Five Points, where the people would be, to be able to just celebrate with them so I could feel the intimacy of the moment. And I felt like Barack was going to nail it tonight, and I believe he nailed it.

OBAMA SUPPORTER 2: America broke my heart with Katrina. And I lost my hope. And I felt that forty years of working for change from the civil rights movement, working with Dr. King in Chicago’s movement, was all dark. And I felt that my life was nothing, that we had failed America. And I traveled abroad to train other women to run for elected office, and they won. There are members of parliament in Kenya and in other countries. And I came back to find a Barack Obama [inaudible]. And it restored my hope. Iowa restored my hope.

OBAMA SUPPORTER 3: I’ve been in education for thirty-two years, and it is a sad situation right now. We need to make sure our kids are covered, and right now they are not. I’m not worried at all. I’m not worried at all, because it’s time for a change, and our change has come. Our change has come.

OBAMA SUPPORTER 4: I thought that it was—that he sent a clear message to Democrats, Republicans, and to Independents, that he indeed is ready to serve on day one as the president of the United States of America.

OBAMA SUPPORTER 5: I’m almost sixty, OK? So, say like some of us that are in our nineties, like one old lady, she got so excited, almost ninety in here tonight, and fell, just dropping, passed out. These are people, they’re coming from generations of slaves. That we have a baby from a white woman from Kansas—I’m from Kansas, too! And the love she had, and her white mother and father that raised that little black baby to be so sweet—where do you see that, but in America?

OBAMA SUPPORTER 6: I thought it was an incredible speech. It was grassroots, all the way up to the level of what needed to be said. He closed out the convention with this speech. And as a kid growing up in Alabama under Jim Crow all the way back, to see this result is fantastic, because it’s not just about Barack, as he said. This is about the American people. And he took it to that level.

AMY GOODMAN: Voices from the historic Five Points neighborhood of Denver.

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