America's History Gives Way to Its Future

By Kevin Merida
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 5, 2008

After a day of runaway lines that circled blocks, of ladies hobbling on canes and drummers rollicking on street corners, the enormous significance of Barack Obama's election finally began to sink into the landscape. The magnitude of his win suggested that the country itself might be in a gravitational pull toward a rebirth that some were slow to recognize.

Tears flowed, not only for Obama's historic achievement, but because many were happily discovering that perhaps they had underestimated possibility in America.

When the novelist Kim McLarin watched her vote being recorded at her polling station in Milton, Mass., she stood still for a moment with her 8-year-old son, Isaac. "My heart was full. I could scarcely breathe," she said. "What I've been forced to acknowledge is there has been a shift -- it's not a sea change. But there's been a decided shift in the meaning of race. It's not an ending. It's a beginning."

What kind of beginning it is, Americans were wrestling with late into the night, some popping champagne and others burdened with unease. Would enduring strains of intolerance lose their power or gain rebellious steam? Could new hope be harnessed to create new solutions? Is America ready to pull itself together or resigned to live divided? The campaign that began for Obama 21 months ago had raised in stark terms whether America was ready for a black president. Last night's answer -- a resounding yes -- raises the next question: How much more change will America embrace?

When McLarin learned last night that the nation had voted with her, she fell to her knees and clutched her children. Outside, car horns honked. Inside, she was trembling. "The feeling is indescribable," she said. "It's like this communal thing. It's transforming."

Across America, the revelry looked like a rolling collage of World Series celebrations. In the nation's capital, Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House became the symbolic location for exultation. What began as a spontaneous gathering of 100 just past 11 p.m. soon mushroomed into thousands by 1 a.m., people chanting in the rain outside the home of George W. Bush. In Washington's hip nightlife corridor, U Street, traffic yielded to jubilation.

Presidential elections often reveal something about the nation's character, its temperament and state of mind. Many who are wondering how it happened that Barack Obama was elected president this season are also wondering what else they may be missing in their cities and towns and neighborhoods. Transformation rarely announces itself with trumpets. It usually happens gradually, over time, and then -- clang!-- a singular moment chimes the news. From its founding, the United States has seen itself as a special place, an example to other nations, a "city on the hill.'' With the election of its first black president, it can now begin to erase one of the stains on that reputation, one that repeatedly shamed us in front of other countries.

Some of the nation's old cleavages are disappearing, and Americans are beginning to rethink their notions of each other. Are the states really red or blue? Are the suburbs really white middle-class enclaves? Are the cities really wastelands for the poor?

Latinos have spearheaded half the nation's population growth this decade. Blacks are migrating back to the South. Millennials are migrating toward each other, regardless of race or ethnicity. They are helping to define these times simply through their mastery of the Internet and their idea of borderless social interaction. Like that 89-character text message that's been forwarded from cellphone to cellphone, a new generation honoring an older one: "Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack is running so our children can fly."

The millennials may have found their first president -- one who engages them in their own space. The political geography of the country is getting all mixed up, too. The movement of Californians and new immigrants to states such as New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada are changing the complexion of the inter-mountain West.

And then there is the living history of America, an America with citizens who were sharecroppers, who were chomped on by dogs while trying to register to vote, who hid behind hooded white robes at night and ran businesses in the day. They are us, too, still alive, living among one another.

Lorraine Bell's grandmother was part of that history, but Georgia Bardley is gone. In 1937, Bardley paid a $3 poll tax for a Mississippi election in which she was too frightened to vote. On Tuesday, Bardley's granddaughter, and her granddaughter's daughters, waited two hours in Bowie to vote for Obama, holding aloft the faded, yellowed poll tax receipt signed by the Noxubee County sheriff. "We felt that not only were we voting for ourselves," said Bell, "but we were voting for my grandparents and for all the African Americans who were ever denied the vote."

After Kim McLarin voted in Massachusetts, she went to teach her class on the literature of slavery and freedom at Emerson College. Tuesday's lesson was on the words of Frederick Douglass. Had Douglass lived in a different era, perhaps he could have been the first African American president. He was one of the towering figures of the 19th century, an abolitionist statesman who had flair and gravitas. He was a prolific writer, a supporter of the women's suffrage movement and a public model of black dignity. Standing up for dignity was often the first hurdle for generations of blacks who were oppressed and so beaten down that they lost the fight they had inside them. Not Douglass.

In his autobiography, Booker T. Washington recalled a conversation he once had with Douglass about traveling by train in Pennsylvania, a state Obama swept through yesterday. Douglass was forced to ride in the baggage car despite paying the same fare as white passengers. When some of them repaired to the baggage car to console Douglass about being degraded in that manner, Douglass straightened himself on the box he was sitting upon, as Washington recounted, and replied: "The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me."

McLarin wonders: "How many extraordinary people have this country tossed by the wayside because of the color of their skin? Now we're beginning to reconcile the fundamental injustice on which this country was founded, which has scarred us from the beginning of time. Obama's election is a huge balm on that wound."

Dignity, justice.

Dennis Rahiim Watson, an actor from Harlem, has been doing his one-man show "The First Black President of the United States" for 25 years. He has performed at inner-city schools and historically black colleges, but also at Harvard, Dartmouth, Tufts, Notre Dame -- more than 3,000 performances, most of them in front of largely white audiences. He stands on a stage and fields questions in a mock-news-conference format, and young people get to see what a black president might sound like, act like, think like.

Yesterday, Watson was thinking of his own 25-year emotional investment in this high office. And finally, there was relief. "The last glass ceiling has been broken by Barack Obama." And now what? "No more excuses," said Watson, who does motivational speaking and works with black youth on achievement. "Barack Obama represents no more excuses. Like Booker T. Washington said, throw your buckets down and get busy."

Obama sent a letter to Watson this past summer, in tribute to the 25th anniversary of his show. Watson has the letter laminated in a book of memories. "You have broadcast the message that all children can dream big dreams, and that anyone, regardless of the color of their skin, can achieve anything," Obama wrote. "Anyone can grow up to become the president of the United States."

This, Barack Obama now knows.

Adam Bradley, an expert on hip-hop and author of a forthcoming book on rap lyricism, understands that many of an older generation see Obama's victory as a culmination of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. And in a sense it is, he said. "But maybe a better word would be a commencement," Bradley continued, "a start to potentially a new era in politics -- one that gives us a multiracial president for a multiracial democracy. To me, it's the meeting of the man and the moment." Bradley, who, like Obama, is biracial, voted early Tuesday morning in West Los Angeles at a small, one-room community center with five voting stations that on most years never get much of a workout. He arrived before the polls opened and was 30th in line. Throughout the day, his mind kept drifting back to a party he attended over the weekend at which he met a man in his 60s who lives in the Brazilian rain forest. "He came to the U.S. this week to simply see Obama get elected president," said Bradley. "He had quite literally left the Amazon and came to visit with friends here to witness the election. It was a pretty startling thing."

But the mind's struggle over Obama continues for some.

The Rev. Tam Tran, a Catholic priest in Forestville, couldn't be more adamantly opposed to Obama, because for him, as he put it, "the fundamental issue is to save the life of the unborn." He voted for John McCain, and coming to terms with an Obama presidency is difficult but necessary, he said. "Division itself is not too bad," Tran said. "It's natural. What we do with that, that's important."

These are strange times. Obama carried Virginia, even its Prince Edward County in the Southside rural region of a state that was once the soul of the Confederacy.

Strange times.

Mark McKinnon, who has been a media and communications strategist for both President George W. Bush and McCain, let the Arizona senator know early on that he would not work to defeat Obama. Not this year. "This election says to the world, America lives up to our ideals," said McKinnon. "It's a proud moment in our history. And though I disagree with Obama politically, I didn't want to be on the books as having worked against this incredible achievement."

Some of those who chose to celebrate this achievement by dancing, with music, dusted off their scratchy Sam Cooke albums. Sam Cooke seemed appropriate.

It's been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.

Staff writers Jose Antonio Vargas, Peter Slevin and Brigid Schulte and research director Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.