"It's a glorious day," Lawrence Tolliver declared at the kitchen table of his home on West Adams Street.
"It reminds me of the day they desegregated the schools," said Freddie Moore, his next-door neighbor, who was watching early election day coverage with the Tolliver family.
Lawrence and his wife, Bernadette, were about to walk down the street to McCarty Memorial Church and vote along with their two sons, Aaron and Bernard, and their daughter, Alexandra.
"I've been asking people what this meant to them," said Tolliver, who is African American. "Overwhelmingly, people said the same thing: 'I thought I'd never see the day.' "
As election day rolled around, I couldn't think of anyone I'd rather spend time with than Tolliver. For more than seven years, he and the customers at his Florence Avenue barbershop have treated me to one of the best, longest-running shows in Los Angeles.
"A watering hole of truth and knowledge," says Tolliver's business card, which is carried by cops, politicians, professors, business executives, teachers, pharmacists, laborers and others who aren't afraid to speak their minds on the issues of the day in passionate encounters that make for great theater.
Tolliver slings it with the best of them, but ends up, always, speaking for justice and reason. If a cop beats up a car thief, he wants to know why the hooligan stole the car. If someone talks about the challenges of raising kids in a tough neighborhood, Tolliver the optimist points to his college-educated sons and daughter.
And when someone in his barbershop recently suggested a victory by Sen. Barack Obama wouldn't really mean that race relations have gotten any better, he pounced.
"I'm proud to be an American," he bellowed, arguing that on the same days in 1955, 1963 and 2008, a 14-year-old black youth was tortured for whistling at a white woman, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I have a dream" speech, and Sen. Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president.
"For a long time, the American dream has been achievable as far as finances go," Mr. Tolliver said Tuesday morning at his home. "But what I consider the American promise -- we hold these truths self-evident, that all men are created equal -- was not a promise kept. This is the day when, if Barack Obama is elected president, it's a promise kept."
Just after 11 a.m., Tolliver and his family headed for their polling place.
