Like millions of Americans, I stayed up well past my bedtime Tuesday. And, like many who stayed glued to their television sights that night, I felt a tear or two well up in my eyes when, at a minute past 11, NBC announced that Barack Hussein Obama had topped the 270 electoral college vote mark to become the nation's 44th president.
It was then that we could see that the charged atmosphere that had been building like static electricity at Chicago's jam-packed Grant Park suddenly erupted, as young and old, male and female, poor and well-to-do, black, white, red, yellow, and brown, stood together in a profoundly moving spectacle of collective triumph — all but impossible to ever adequately put into words.
The journey to the climactic moment of that remarkable night had been long in coming, a fact that no doubt accounts for the beaming faces and tears of joy that flowed freely down the cheeks of so many of the more that 250,000 people who had gathered at Grant Park, Chicago's front lawn, to await the outcome of Tuesday's presidential election.
The long wait was over for what many — both in the crowd and looking on at home — thought they would never live to see. No longer could it ever be said that such a thing could never happen in America. Four decades after the descendents of slaves were guaranteed the right to vote in every region, state, city, and town in the country, a black man had been elected president of the United States.
During the months and days leading up to the election, the youthful and energetic senator from Illinois had done what even a year earlier would have been considered impossible. He had beaten the odds in winning his party's nomination, then taken the lead over his Republican opponent as the race for the White House entered its final few weeks.
Still, there were doubts about the accuracy of the polls — not to mention doubts about the nature and character of the American electorate's heart. Who, after all, could be certain how race would figure in the outcome of the election, especially once voters found themselves alone with their hopes, longings, and fears in the voting booth?
But at one minute after 11 Tuesday night, the question was largely put to bed, and as Grant Park exploded in a joyously rousing celebratory cheer, my first thought was about some of the people who had paved the way for Obama's election, many of whom are regrettably no longer here to both bask and share in the glory of this truly historic achievement.
I thought about Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. I thought about the Freedom Riders of the early 1960s, and James Meredith who, during a terrible spree of violence in 1962, broke a century-old color barrier at the University of Mississippi.
Others came to mind as well. There was Andrew Goodwin, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, killed by racists in 1964 Mississippi while advancing the cause of civil rights. Then there was Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond, four brave young black college students, better known as the Greensboro Four, who in 1960 risked beatings, jailing, even death, by sitting down at a "Whites-Only" Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., so that one day black people everywhere could stand up and take their rightful place as citizens of an America free of racism's many evil forms of discrimination and oppression.
I also thought about Emmett Till last Tuesday night, along with Jackie Robinson, the baseball player, writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin, and civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
King, who knew that he would not live to see it, had earlier proclaimed that the dawn of a new day would come when the color of a person's skin would no longer be an obstacle to acceptance or achievement anywhere in America.
It is because of the extraordinary efforts of these and other civil and human rights pioneers that the election of the nation's first-ever African-American president represents more than a political victory for the energetic, articulate, and visionary young bridge-builder from Illinois. The Obama victory amounts to an historic achievement for which the people of what is now the most racially diversified nation on the face of the Earth can now all lay claim.
In some lands, such diversity might be considered a liability. But not here in America. Here in America, such diversity is a strength that reveals itself as the possible dawning of that day which the late Dr. King spoke of so famously some 45 years ago.
What remains to be seen is whether our new president, his colleagues in Congress, and the rest of us, will welcome the dawning of this new day by harnessing the energy and building on the diversity that is, and always has been, the strength of this country.
Jim Munn, a regular contributor to the Times, coaches boys track and field at Gloucester High School.
