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Bettye Hall, owner of Harvest Hair Salon, arranges hair products at her business on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue on Wednesday. "I start my day off daily praying that Congress and the president can come together, stop fighting against one another and do what's best for the country," Hall said. (ADAM BRIMER/NEWS SENTINEL)
Hair stylist Bettye Hall doesn't like to gossip, but she will lend an ear when her clients come in, eager to talk about President Barack Obama and the latest news from Washington.
Hall, owner of Harvest Hair Salon, 2336 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave., said she's heard all kinds of political opinions in her 30 years of doing hair. She's worried the country will go nowhere fast if Obama and members of Congress don't find common ground.
"I start my day off daily praying that Congress and the president can come together, stop fighting against one another and do what's best for the country," Hall said. "It's just so sad that we have to be divided, and as long as we're divided, we will not stand."
With Obama's public inauguration scheduled for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, many Knoxvillians are hoping the president and other national leaders will be mindful of King's vision of a united nation.
They want to see things get done in Washington, D.C., over the next four years — though they have differing opinions about what the national agenda should be.
CIVIL-RIGHTS ICON: COME TOGETHER
The Rev. Harold A. Middlebrook, a longtime Knoxville and Memphis civil-rights leader who was with King when he was shot, remembers what it was like not to have the right to vote.
The founding pastor of Canaan Baptist Church of Christ, 117 Beaman Lake Road, wants Obama to solidify what he fought for as a member of the NAACP and Committee On Appeal for Human Rights all those years ago by modifying the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Periodic congressional action is required to prevent literacy tests and poll taxes from being used as a way to keep blacks from balloting.
"African-Americans were involved in the very building of the foundation of this country, but for nobody else is there a bill that has to be renewed ... to ensure for African-Americans the right to vote," Middlebrook said.
"So one of the things I would hope is the president at some point would present to Congress a piece of legislation that makes and ensures for African-Americans the same right to vote as it does for everybody, and it just doesn't make sense to me that we have to go through this" every time the provision of the act is set to expire.
Middlebrook is also hoping Obama will expand his health-care bill to help more mentally challenged people, as well as that the president will work to improve an educational system that might soon become too dependent on technology.
"Of course, I am not opposed to technology, but one of my concerns is we've given 'Johnny' a computer, and he can't read. We've given him a computer, and he can't count," he said. "Another thing is our young folk and our adults have no sense of reasoning, so they never stop to think about, 'What will be the end result of my actions?'"
Middlebrook said he is also worried that the members of Congress might be becoming too complacent.
"In the original founding of Congress, (the members) were part-time congressmen. They would come to Washington, deal with the session and go back home among their people, where they could hear and listen to the folks that they represent," he said.
"So often now, our elected officials have adopted the attitude that they are going to tell us what's good for us rather than listen to the people in making the decisions. I don't know if (Obama) can bring about that change within the next four years, but I think if he could get a discussion going on, it would help."
His largest hope, though, is that Obama will remember King's message of unity and peace throughout his second term.
"I think Martin King's life, along with this president, was trying to say to us there is a better way, but we have to learn to work together. We have to learn to love each other, and we have to learn to share."
PROFESSOR: INCOME DISPARITY GROWING
Joshua Inwood
Joshua Inwood, assistant professor of geography and Africana studies at the University of Tennessee, wants to see Obama address the growing gap between social classes.
There are "food security issues," Inwood said — meaning, people literally don't know if they will have enough food to feed their families each week. At the same time, mass amounts of wealth are being accumulated by a small slice of society.
"We are living in a time of increasing disparity between those who have and those who have not," he said. "We've not really talked about poverty since the 1960s, so I'd very much like to see the president address those issues, and I think that's really what King would be interested in."
After the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre, gun control has risen to the top of many people's agendas, but Inwood said the problem of violence in the U.S. is much larger than just automatic pistols and ammo clips.
"We live in a society with an extreme amount of violence," he said. "I don't think we should focus necessarily on gun control because we live in a society that tolerates violence all across the board in terms of domestic relationships, interpersonal issues and other situations."
LOCAL DEMOCRATS: STAY ON TRACK
Gloria Johnson
Gloria Johnson, a freshman state lawmaker representing Knoxville's 13th House District, cut her teeth coordinating volunteers for Obama's 2008 campaign.
A career teacher, she said she expects the president to continue pressing for policies that will benefit the middle class and grow the economy.
"Generally, President Obama should continue focusing on reforms that strengthen the middle class — initiatives that attract good-paying jobs, invest in public schools and bring down health-care costs for working families," she said.
"In his first term, the U.S. economy created more than 5 million jobs. It didn't happen in a vacuum. The president was committed to investing in services that grow the economy like higher education and job retraining, and he cut $1.4 trillion, or 10 years worth, of government waste."
Evelyn Gill, a teacher who ran for a Knoxville state Senate seat last year, said she thinks Obama will continue to look for ways to increase safety in schools and in communities and ways to ensure the lesbians and gays have the right to get married and live in peace.
"In terms of making sure all Americans have affordable health care, he will move that agenda forward, make sure people have access to good jobs and make sure our nation is on the world stage, as it should be," Gill said.
UT STUDENTS: DIFFERING PRIORITIES
At the University of Tennessee, it's not hard to find disagreement on what international and U.S. students want to see in Obama's second term.
Many of these same students cast their first ballot ever in a presidential election last November. And Obama heavily courted young voters with his "change" message.
Many of them — some about to enter the job market — have concerns about the protracted national recession.
Julia Bell, a senior majoring in linguistics, math and Asian studies, said while she agrees with Obama's more liberal policies, she thinks his priorities need to be almost solely on fixing the economy over the next four years.
"I do support minority rights, but I feel like most people don't want to experiment with social anything when they don't even know where their next paycheck is coming from," she said. "I think if he really wants to help minorities and start these big social experiments with gay marriage, he really needs to fix the economy first and get the majority of Americans to a point where they are comfortable enough and can survive."
Alfred Taliaferro, a freshman studying sports journalism, voted for the first time in the last election. An Obama supporter, Taliaferro said he hopes the president can find a way to implement better gun-control laws and lower tuition.
"The rising of tuition is looking like it's going to be a burden, not just for my generation, but for the generation after me. It looks like it's going to be an ongoing battle of trying to get money to be able to afford college," he said.
Taliaferro said he also hopes to see more blacks elected to Congress, and he wants more effort made to increase economic opportunity for minorities.
"Since he is being inaugurated on Martin Luther King Day, it would be nice to see him work on getting African-Americans better jobs," he said.
International students Jonathan Brago, who studies international relations at the University of Brasilia, and Pedro Delfino, a law student at Brazil's Federal University of Minas Gerais, have generally good expectations for Obama's next term, after watching the country and its elections very closely over the past four years.
Delfino said he supported Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012 and thinks the president's health-care policies could be good for the country.
"In Brazil, people see the health-care act as a good thing because we have something similar," Delfino said.
Brago said during Obama's first term, China increased its participation with Brazil, while the U.S. decreased participation. He said he would like to see that change and have the countries affiliate more with each other.
"I think Brazil has a lot to gain with the U.S. partnership more than with the Chinese partnership, and I think it would be better if he increased that partnership in the second term," Brago said.
Brago said another aspect Obama could work on is uniting the country on issues that have been divisive, like whether or not to have a gun in every classroom, an idea touted after the Sandy Hook shooting.
"I see Obama is working hard to not only move the U.S. economy forward, but also to have minorities be more accepted in certain parts of the U.S., and that is something that is hard to change," Brago said. "We had such an idea that the U.S. was a whole integrated country, and now that we are here, we see that there are a lot of particularities that might be a huge problem in the future."
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