SC Yellow Dogs

Here’s a really inspirational story from the Politico.

For anyone doubting that opportunity still exists in America, there is the story of Jaime Harrison.

Harrison is a top aide to House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, a job that ranks among the most influential in Congress. He has an office at the dead center of the Capitol building — a place senators would envy — offering a perfectly aligned view of the Washington Monument. On the walls hang photos of him schmoozing with celebrities, politicians and celebrity politicians, from Dave Chappelle and Bono to Bill Richardson and Barack Obama. Most days, he works on the floor of the House of Representatives, directing Clyburn’s floor staff and conferring with members of Congress to make sure Democrats have enough votes to pass key legislation.

Consider that life experience, filled with the luminaries of politics and entertainment, and then contemplate the one into which Harrison was born in Orangeburg, S.C., a poor, majority-African-American town of 13,000. Orangeburg is the place where, in 1968, three civil rights protesters were killed and 27 were wounded when police fired into a crowd gathered at South Carolina State University in what became known as the Orangeburg massacre.

Harrison, now 32, was born almost exactly eight years after the massacre to a 15-year-old mother and her high school boyfriend. It was an inauspicious start, both in geography and circumstances, and no harbinger of what was to come.

Growing up, Harrison worked as a bingo hall caller, operating the ball machine and yelling the numbers out over the bowed heads of the players, the air smoky with the smell of hot dog grease.

“The boss always wanted me to go faster so he could get more games in,” he said. “I would speed it up, and then someone would say, ‘Boy, slow your ass down!’”

With his father gone and his mother often in Atlanta, Harrison was raised by his grandparents. His grandmother, who was 38 when he was born, had unfulfilled dreams of being a nurse. She had an eighth-grade education. His grandfather had finished the fourth grade and then worked in construction, building up Hilton Head Island. The family moved several times when he was young, from a house to a trailer home, then, after a foreclosure, to his great aunt’s house, and finally to a rental home.

When the foreclosure happened — he said it was the result of fraud — Harrison made a promise to himself that if he ever made any money, he would buy his grandparents a house. He never wanted them to relive the embarrassment of the foreclosure.

Despite the frequent moves, Harrison described a near-idyllic childhood filled with loving relatives, good food and comic books.

“People tell me, ‘Man, Jaime, you were dirt poor,’” he said. “Yeah, but I loved it.”

He ate his grandmother’s sumptuous food, savoring a favorite dish of lima beans and ham hocks. He honed his reading skills, diving into Spider-Man, X-Men and his grandparents’ bills. He scored well on standardized tests, impressing teachers who had already given him good grades.

As he got older, college brochures began to arrive. Although he hadn’t heard of the Ivy League, he did know that places like Harvard and Yale were prestigious. So when Yale held an admissions session in nearby Columbia, he borrowed his grandfather’s 1978 Ford LTD and headed off. An admissions video and an a cappella performance later, he was ready to apply.

The following spring was a time of high anxiety. Each day, Harrison walked expectantly down the dirt path from his grandparents’ rented duplex to the mailbox to look for the proverbial thick envelope.

He remembers the date even today, sitting in his Capitol office in a chair he had reupholstered to his liking. “April 2, 1994,” the day he fished out a meaty envelope and tore it open, his eyes flying over the page. Accepted. With a full scholarship.

“I got in! I got in!” he hollered, leaping into the air at the curb.

His grandmother rushed out to the porch. “Boy, why you screaming?”

“I got into Yale!” He ran back up the path and described to her what the letter said.

“She knew it was something that was really important to me,” he recalled. “I don’t know if she grasped how big it was.”

He phoned his mother, Patricia Stewart, to tell her the news.

“When he called me, it was like he just won the lottery,” Stewart said. “We all [were] excited.”

Harrison isn’t the only one in Washington with an Orangeburg connection. Nearly a decade before the massacre, Harrison’s boss, Clyburn, was a leader in the burgeoning civil rights movement at South Carolina State, organizing the first sit-ins in the state.

By the time Harrison applied to Yale in the ’90s, many of the battles Clyburn’s generation had waged against the indignities of discrimination had been won. Clyburn and his contemporaries had unlocked the doors that Harrison, 30 years later, would burst through.

“That’s as it should be,” Clyburn said. “His success is what we were sacrificing for. … Jaime Harrison may be standing on my shoulders. I’m standing on someone’s shoulders, too. He’ll provide some shoulders for other people to stand on.”

Harrison’s opening weeks at Yale were rocky, filled with doubts about whether he could compete with kids from the best high schools in the country.

His freshman-year roommate, a Catholic kid from Long Island who was the son of a lawyer and a nurse, asked Harrison to read over an essay he had written.

“I read it and thought, ‘This reads like a textbook.’ It was so good. I went back and read mine and thought, ‘Oh, God, I don’t think I should be here.’” Harrison went from getting straight A’s in high school to B’s and even a C+ his first semester in college. “It shook me hard.”

He sought help from the school’s writing coaches, worked diligently and slowly watched his grades pick up. On the social front, he excelled, transcending boundaries of race and background to cultivate friends in all areas of the university. He was elected treasurer of the Yale senior class.

“He’s something very unique,” said Harvey Goldblatt, who led Harrison’s residential college at Yale. “There’s an essential decency about him — very warm, very loyal, easily able to pick up on someone’s worth as a human being. … He’s one of my great stories.”

Harrison calls Goldblatt, a Jewish professor of Medieval Slavic literature originally from Canada, his “Yale dad,” one of several men who have served as stand-ins for an absent father.

When Harrison graduated, Goldblatt presented him with an award for the student whose story was most emblematic of the Yale experience. It was pouring rain and Goldblatt took to the podium to announce the winner.

“‘Gee, I wonder who this is going to be,’” he recalled joking to the crowd. “I’ve never said that before.” Harrison was the obvious winner.

After college, Harrison returned to Orangeburg to teach at his old high school for a year, where he lavished special attention on promising young black men grasping for role models. He then moved to Washington to work with a nonprofit educational group and later enrolled in law school at Georgetown before getting the job in Clyburn’s office.

In 2004, with a law degree in hand and a solid job, he went back to Orangeburg to make good on a promise.

“When he took my mom and dad to the house, they just cried like babies,” said Stewart, Harrison’s mom. “My dad, he couldn’t stop thanking him for what he did.”

He bought his grandparents a house in a good neighborhood with enough room for his grandfather, then a diabetic amputee, to maneuver his wheelchair.

“It was like they moved from the ‘hood to Beverly Hills,” Stewart said. “It wasn’t really Beverly Hills, but it felt like it.”

At work, Harrison manages Clyburn’s floor staff, devising strategies for passing important bills. Last spring, just after Democrats took control of Congress, Harrison faced his first major test when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) moved a bill that would have curbed military operations in Iraq.

“It was a tough vote. People on the left were saying it wasn’t tough enough. People on the right were saying it was too ambitious,” he said. “I remember going into an early meeting. That first whip count was ugly.”

Passing the bill also had personal meaning for Harrison. One of the students he had taught back in Orangeburg, a young African-American named Vorn Mack, died while serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq in 2003.

“He was a good kid,” Harrison recalled.

Harrison was prepared for the legislative battle, arming himself with a diagram of the House floor, showing where each member of the whip team would be deployed to track Democratic votes.

When the vote began, Harrison watched the tally board above the House chamber. As the vote count crested 218, he began to tear up. It had passed.

“It was such an emotional thing for me,” he said. His diagram had been a success, he made his boss look good, and maybe he had done something for the other Vorn Macks in Iraq, he thought.

Had Harrison been born in a different era, he might have used his smarts and likability to become the greatest mechanic Orangeburg had ever seen or the most heroic school bus driver or the most efficient factory floor manager. Instead, he plans to run for elective office someday.

“I’ve talked to people. I’ve thought about things,” he said. “Eventually it will happen.

“I’d love to serve in Congress, but I’d also love to help change South Carolina.”