Shedding the Shackles of the Past for the Promises of What Today and Tomorrow Hold

JAMESTOWN, Va. Just beyond the remains of a Confederate military earthwork, past the site of the first English settlement in the New World, you come to the James River -- where the first Africans arrived on these shores as slaves.

Spirits of the ancestors occupy this place, as I'm sure any African American who has ever visited a slave harbor will understand. We often conjure their spirits during visits to places like Goree Island; at ports in New Orleans and Charleston, S.C.; in Barbados and Brazil; and here in the Virginia Tidewater, at what passes for an Ellis Island for black folks in America, sans the Statue of Liberty, of course.

From the haunting of lost souls experienced during a recent visit, I sensed that Barack Obama's victory as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States is but a down payment on sacrifices that can never be repaid. Still, it's enough to make leg irons rattle throughout the Middle Passage.

When that Dutch man of war landed here 389 years ago, the cargo was more than just 20 slaves. An evil, unique in the history of man, was also offloaded, with the purpose of building a New World for whites on the backs of blacks. Millions of Africans were kidnapped from their homes, tight-packed in the bowels of ships and brought to the Americas to work and die in bondage.

The dehumanization was institutionalized, the diabolical scheme justified by corrupting Christianity and science in service to racism. It's a wonder black people survived at all.

And yet, here we are, witnessing what appears to be a quantum leap in the often slow and plodding story of racial progress in America. And Obama, in a gesture to the ancestors, has been most eloquent in noting what has brought us to this day. In a speech on race in Philadelphia in March, he declared:

"What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part -- through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience, and always at great risk -- to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time."

Of course, we should not get carried away. For if our ancestors have anything to teach, it is that the landscape of race in America is littered with disappointment and betrayal. Remember Reconstruction, they warn, when black people thought freedom would ring forever. And don't forget Martin Luther King Jr., who offered America a vision of hope from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 45 years ago -- and was assassinated long before that dream became the reality of his time.

Regardless of what tomorrow brings, however, now has to be a time of celebration. In 1607, not far from where the slaves would later come ashore, a fort was built that a few hundred English settlers called home. From their lives sprang the nation's first experiments with representative government, free enterprise and the rule of law.

It is the evolution of democracy, begun here, in the birthplace of modern America, that set the stage on which Obama's astounding political accomplishments are now unfolding. Thank the ancestors for pushing America to live up to its ideals, but also America for having ideals to live up to.

What must surely thrill the ancestral heart, perhaps even more than the prospect of a first black president, is a vision of Barack in the White House with his wife, Michelle, and their two children. For together they symbolize the triumph of the black family despite slavery's centuries-old effort to destroy it.

As historian Eric Foner has noted: "Among slavery's greatest abuses was destroying male authority and making it impossible for women to fulfill their roles as mothers and wives."

Michelle Obama offered a counterpoint to that tragedy when she spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Denver on Monday.

"I come here as a mom whose girls are the heart of my heart and the center of my world," she said. "And as I tuck that little girl and her sister into bed at night, I think about how one day, they'll have families of their own. And one day, they and your sons and daughters will tell their own children what we did together in this election."

It would be a White House bedtime story sure to make the spirits soar.

E-mail: milloyc@washpost.com