Obama has changed the world just by being elected

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.