Washington, D.C.
In 1968, as Washington burned in the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination, few would have predicted that in 40 years’ time America would elect a black president. But on Tuesday night, a diverse crowd gathered on the same street where the rioting had reached its height in 1968 to celebrate Obama’s election.
Earlier in the day, in a heavily African-American neighbourhood in DC, I watched people who had been brought up under segregation cast their ballots for Barack Obama, and I thought back to a voter I met in South Carolina on the eve of the primary there. He was an elderly African-American man, a second world war veteran. He described how when he returned from Europe, from fighting — though he didn’t mention it — in a segregated army, he went to register to vote. He was asked to copy out a chunk of the Constitution, something that as a college graduate he was more than capable of. He was failed for supposedly missing a comma. At this point in the story he gripped my arm and his voice dropped to a whisper. ‘But a change is coming to South Carolina,’ he said, sotto voce. ‘A change is coming.’ For this man, his opportunity to vote for Obama would right those wrongs.
That change has now come to the nation as a whole. No other president has ever changed America as much as Obama has by just being elected.
America has known for weeks that it was about to make history. But it has shied away from discussing the subject. Obama, above all a cautious politician, did not bring it up. A media that is aware of how pro-Obama it has seemed at times tiptoed around this element of the contest and the McCain campaign nobly steered clear of any last-minute racial dog whistles.
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