Long after the speeches for the occasion have been given, the solemn oaths of office administered, and the immense crowds have cheered our new president all along the parade route from Capitol Hill to the White House grounds, today will be remembered as among the most important in American history. The departure of one chief executive and the welcoming of another is always a significant event.

Yet the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as America’s 44th president elevates the moment of 2009 even beyond its usual quadrennial majesty. An amazing and inspiring man in his own right, he is our first African-American chief executive and thus a special bearer of our national hopes and dreams. His swearing-in ought to therefore mark a healing of wounds borne far too long, even from before the founding. The revolutionary generation of Washington, Jefferson and Adams gave us the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. With them came a vision of liberty, equality and opportunity that has since made our nation in so many ways a genuine approximation of the city on a hill dreamed of by our Puritan ancestors. But the founding also bequeathed to us the shame of slavery, and the scar of inequality that remained after its abolishment in 1865. We have struggled mightily in the century since, and never more markedly than in the most recent decades of our existence, to shed the vestiges of inequality and thus bind up our still painful wounds.