A couple of bright lights are breaking through the election night gloom. Thousands of brothers and sisters incarcerated under Three Strikes for petty, nonviolent crimes will have a chance at freedom if Yes on Prop 66 holds onto its slim lead in California. And Illinois will send a young Black man, Barack Obama, who calls himself “the skinny kid with the funny name,” to the U.S. Senate.

Nationwide, Blacks overcame all kinds of dirty tricks to vote 90 percent for Kerry in hopes of evicting Bush from his public housing, while in Hunters Point, a tyrannical election supervisor ordered public housing tenants to shut up and leave their polling place without voting after one woman simply asked her neighbor for help reading her ballot. We’ll have the full story next week.

Congressman Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who was re-elected, cheered Barack Obama’s “taking a giant step into the pages of history as the first African American elected to the United States Senate in the 21st century and the first African American male Democrat (ever) to serve in the nation’s highest legislative body.”

Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother, stepped into the national spotlight with an electrifying keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in July. Some of his most adoring fans, however, are in the village of Nyang’oma, Kenya, where his father and grandfather are buried in the yard outside the home of his step-grandmother, Sarah Ogwel Onyango, 83, who loves to look through her sack full of snapshots and newspaper clippings of young Barack.

“He is Kenyan,” Onyango insists. Her famous grandson has visited Nyang’oma twice, loves the food and picked up a few words of Luo, the local language. He has promised to return after the election.

“We hope that when he wins, we all win,” Lawrence Were, a 17-year-old student at the village high school, told the New York Times. “It’s not all that easy for an African to go so far. We consider him our man.”

The school, where the students learn despite having no library, textbooks, electricity or running water, will soon be renamed the Barack Obama Secondary School.

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