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Tampa Woman Recalls Path Paved For Obama

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By VALERIE KALFRIN

vkalfrin@tampatrib.com

Published: January 19, 2009

TAMPA - Pauline Cole remembers riding in the back of the Ybor City streetcar because she was black.

She graduated from Middleton High School when it was segregated and heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak twice.

Tuesday, awash in history, she'll watch on television as Barack Obama becomes the nation's 44th president and its first black one. And it's precisely that grounding in history that makes her realize - and appreciate - that Obama didn't get to this point alone.

"Once I look back and see all the efforts that people did for this time to come, it brings tears to my eyes," she said. "His coming up didn't just happen. It happened on the heels and the backs of those that have gone on."

Born in 1934 to Georgia sharecroppers, Cole and her family moved to Tampa when she was 3. Her father was a welder who mailed money to his wife and five children from work sites. Her mother worked at a shipyard and as a seamstress.

Cole attended Lomax Elementary and Booker T. Washington, then a junior high school. She yearned to taste the Spanish food at the Columbia Restaurant, where blacks then weren't allowed, and rode the streetcar to jobs cleaning houses.

"It was understood we rode in the back," she said. "We didn't think anything about it because we didn't know any better."

In 1953, Cole headed to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama on a work-study program for a nursing degree. There, she became involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and urged blacks to vote, encouraging those who were dissuaded by walking miles to apply.

"It came to me that you're being judged on the color of your skin, no matter how much I learned or how I prepared myself," she said. "I said, 'Lord, this is not right.'"

Cole heard King speak once at her college and again in Montgomery, Ala. While working at a hospital in Birmingham, she helped desegregate the cafeterias. Later, at a hospital in Montgomery, she found herself labeled as "obnoxious" when she complained about the black patients relegated to one floor, with stretchers sandwiched in the hallway.

Cole said she wanted to march for voting rights, but couldn't take time away from her job. So she lent her home to the movement, allowing marchers from Selma to stay with her in 1965. She moved back to Tampa in 1970, where she helped establish an organization for minority nurses.

Now a minister and grandmother, Cole said she views Obama not as a "black president" but a president for all people.

"When I know where I came from, through the segregation realm, I can see people individually," she said. "It is really something to see all the progress, to see all the people flocking to Washington like he's a magnet. It's the ideas and the hope he brings with him."

Reporter Valerie Kalfrin can be reached at (813) 259-7800.

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