5 November, 2008
Sierra Express
Change has come!
Barack Obama –
the 44th American President and the First African-American President
Obama dominated the front page
of newspapers around the world this morning!
Kenya declared Thursday a public holiday to celebrate the election of Barack Obama
to the US presidency.
Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first black president, welcomed Mr Obama's victory
as a sign of hope for everyone. “Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world
should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place," he said in a letter of congratulations.
It was forty-five
years ago when Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial and voiced a dream, of when people
would not be judged by the color of their skin. Sen. Barack Obama, barely 2 years old then, realized that dream last night,
more fully than many Americans could ever have imagined.
"We're watching the hinge of history swing," said Roger
Wilkins, an assistant attorney general in President Lyndon Johnson's administration and a friend of King's.
"It's
still unbelievable," said Louis Stokes, the former congressman from Cleveland whose brother, Carl, in 1967 was the first
black man elected mayor of a major American city. "Not withstanding the fact that I believed in this country, to the
degree that I believed that some day this country would rise up to the occasion of electing a qualified African-American to
be its president, I did not expect to see it in my lifetime."
Obama, 47, defeated Sen. John McCain
in one of the most gripping elections in modern history. He will be sworn in on Jan. 20 as the 44th U.S. president.
Coming only four
decades after the nation made it illegal to discriminate in employment and housing, the election of a black man as president
left many Americans tearful with emotion, others exhilarated and jubilant. They stared nervously at TV sets and computer screens
while election results rolled in slowly before 9 p.m., hopeful but cautious.
"I never thought I'd see a brother run for president
and have a chance to win it," Nelson Smith, 55, said as he and about 30 other Obama supporters piled into the basement
of his home to break bread and commemorate what they hoped would be a victory for the first viable black candidate in American
history. "I thought I'd be down in the grave before that happened."
As more states began reporting
results and television networks declared Obama the winner at 11 p.m., the night became electrifying, a rare time when the
profundity of a moment was realized as it was occurring, like the moon landing or the fall of the Berlin Wall. The celebrating
began, in nightclubs, churches, restaurants, hotels and streets, because this was not a night to be alone.
"He's
winning by a landslide," said Cleveland Municipal Judge Charles Patton, 58. "Obama kicked butt. It's a sea change."
Obama's election
would have been unthinkable not long ago, when the United States, barely 100 years after slavery ended, was still weaning
itself from a legacy of racial segregation. McCain appeared to acknowledge as much in his concession speech in Arizona, saying,
"This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special
pride that must be theirs tonight."
When Obama was a boy, black students in cities could not attend the same schools as
whites without court order, so strong was resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling.
Though life for Obama as a child in Hawaii was less harsh than in many American cities, he has spoken and written of racism
and discrimination, including lingering vestiges such as Confederate flags in parts of the South.
Yet, the nation has changed,
if slowly; Virginia, home of the Confederacy's capital, voted for Obama and not for his opponent.
Obama, whose father
was a black man from Kenya and mother a white woman from Kansas, is an individual of complex heritage, a 21st century president-elect
who has known both privilege and hardship. His mother once relied on food stamps, but he obtained degrees from Columbia and
Harvard Law.
He was not the first black U.S. senator; there were four before him. Obama is only the third elected
since Reconstruction. His campaign rarely focused on race, however, save for when he was criticized for failing to distance
himself from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's black-liberation theology. Addressing the issue in a Philadelphia speech on March
18, Obama spoke of tensions felt separately by whites and blacks - of "the complexities of race in this country that
we've never really worked through, a part of our union that we have yet to perfect."
Yet, Obama's presidential
campaign was able to move past the Wright controversy, convincing voters that race was too shallow an issue on which to base
a vote in this troublesome economy.
Americans certainly did not ignore Obama's race. But unlike Shirley Chisholm, Jesse
Jackson and others before him, Obama was the first black major presidential candidate whom a majority of white voters did
not judge by color first.
"It's clear," said Wilkins, now an emeritus professor at George Mason
University, "that there will never again be written a textbook on American history that does not have the name Barack
Obama in it. Forget James Garfield. Forget Grover Cleveland. This is one of those presidencies that will stand out forever."
An election, however,
does not remotely resolve all issues of race. "Not even close," said Hilary O. Shelton, director of the NAACP's
Washington, D.C., bureau.
Disparities in the rates of poverty, educational attainment and homeownership are still
extreme among the races. What will matter now, says Shelton, is the agenda that Obama and Congress are able to enact for all
races, one that Obama has described as lifting up the needy and empowering the middle class. Obama will come to the White
House with a stronger Democratic majority in Congress to support his mandate.
That's the difference, Shelton
said, between Obama and Republican presidential appointees such as Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas. They achieved magnificent rank. But the agendas of their sponsors - smaller government, fewer regulations,
attempts at cutting urban grants - created little enthusiasm in communities that saw the government as a force for eliminating
barriers for millions more people.
In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood in Washington and said, "I have a dream that
my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the
content of their character."
Could he have envisioned what happened on Tuesday?
"I think if you'd said
to him, 'Martin, do you really believe that it would come within the scope of your children's lives, he would have
said, 'No,' " Wilkins said. "I think that most of us who were alive then and adults would have said no.
There were black people having trouble getting jobs as bus drivers in those days. Black women couldn't be telephone operators,
and black men and women couldn't be bank tellers."
Today, they can. Today, a black man is the president-elect of the
United States.
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