Excerpt:
Kenny Cather stood out at the Muslim Inaugural Celebration on Monday night. Tall and blond-haired, he was the first to admit he looked a little out of the ordinary at such a gathering. But that didn't matter to him. This wasn't the first time he had been a minority.
Cather spent several months last year in Youngstown, Ohio, canvassing for Barack Obama's campaign. The Rust Belt city has a large black population and is plagued by high crime and unemployment, he said, and people didn't welcome him with open arms when he first knocked on their doors. Once they found out he was stumping for Obama, though, it was a different story.
"I got hugged. I got invited to dinner," he said. "One woman said to me, 'I never thought I'd see a day when a white man was campaigning for a black man to be president,' and she had tears in her eyes when she said it."
The Obama love was flowing so freely in Youngstown that local gang members even escorted Cather door to door to make sure he was safe, once they found out why he was in the area.
But his dedication to Obama's candidacy wasn't the only thing Cather brought to urban Ohio. After converting to Islam from Christianity in 2004, Cather said he became "more aware of the prejudices against Muslims." In Youngstown, he broke through stereotypes by showing people he was a white man who not only supported a black candidate for president, but was Muslim as well.