DENVER When Jim Clyburn was teaching kids in Charleston almost four decades ago, he told them to shoot for the sky – even though his own experience growing up in the segregated South belied that.
“I told students they could be anything they wanted to be,” he says. “I'm not so sure I believed that.”
As a student at S.C. State University in Orangeburg during the 1960s, Clyburn took part in civil rights protests and paid the price. He felt the spray of fire hoses and spent time in jail.
He went on to become the state's first African American member of Congress since Reconstruction. Now, at 68, he's the third-ranking Democrat in the U.S. House.
Clyburn was at a public gathering in June the night Barack Obama locked up the nomination. Shortly before Obama was to speak, he slipped away to his Columbia home.
“I watched it alone,” he says, “because I was not too sure that emotionally I should be experiencing that speech in public.”
Clyburn has been all over at this week's Democratic convention. He was one of Wednesday's main speakers on the theme of national security.
“Real national security,” his prepared remarks said, “begins by tearing down the barriers of human intolerance and suspicion ….”
Clyburn gives Obama a slim chance to win South Carolina, a reliably red state. But he says Obama's success “makes real all those things I sometimes thought were surreal.”
“Where there's life there's hope,” he says. “If Barack Obama is breathing on Election Day, there's hope for a victory.”
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