When Barack Obama stands on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday and takes the oath of office, the words of Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed more than 45 years ago on the opposite end of the National Mall will still be echoing in the air.
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed,” King said on Aug. 28, 1963, standing before 250,000 people crowded before the Lincoln Memorial. “ ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’ … I have a dream today.”
Now, the first black man to ascend to the presidency will do so one day after the nation celebrated King’s own birthday.
The rest of King’s words are nearly as familiar to many Americans as the Pledge of Allegiance. And less than two years after he spoke them, King stood alongside President Lyndon Johnson as the executive signed into law the National Voting Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed the right to vote for hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks. More than 43 years after that, with multitudes of King’s contemporaries watching and waiting, Obama won the presidential election with a full 95 percent of the black vote.
“The 1965 Voting Rights Act represents the direct line between Obama and the presidency,” said Ronald Walters, a professor of politics at the University of Maryland and deputy campaign manager for the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 bid for the nation’s highest office. “Obama’s presidency represents the zenith of that particular aspect of the dream.”
In formerly segregated Virginia, where one in every five voters was black, more than 90 percent of them supported Obama. Aided by the D.C. Democratic overflow into Northern Virginia, the Democrat took the state for the first time since 1964.
In North Carolina, where black students had to protest for months to be served at lunch counters, blacks made up nearly a quarter of all voters. And 95 percent of them marked a ballot for Obama. His one-percentage-point victory over candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., gave a Democrat the state’s electoral votes for the first time since Southerner Jimmy Carter won in 1976.
Obama’s presidency “wouldn’t have occurred to me 40 years ago, it wouldn’t have occurred to me even 20 years ago,” Walters said. “At the end of [Jackson’s presidential campaign] I said, ‘No, we’ll never have a black president in my lifetime.’ ”
Throughout Washington and across the nation this holiday weekend, millions are reflecting on the extraordinary milestone of electing a black president to a nation still suffering the consequences of a brutally divided past.
At Anacostia’s Covenant Baptist Church on Sunday morning, guest pastor the Rev. Madison Shockley preached it in mountaintop tones to a sanctuary filled with worshippers, nearly all of them wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Obama’s likeness.
“If you don’t think the God possibilities outweigh the human possibilities, just wait about 48 more hours,” Shockley shouted. “If you didn’t think this was possible … wait till Tuesday morning.”
