Powell said that Obama had run a completely new kind of campaign when it came to race. “Shirley [Chisholm] was a wonderful woman, and I admire Jesse [Jackson] and all of my other friends in the black community,” he said, “but I think Obama should not be just—well, ‘They were black, and he’s black, therefore they’re his predecessor.’

“Here’s the difference in a nutshell, and it’s an expression that I’ve used throughout my career—first black national-security adviser, first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs, first black Secretary of State. What Obama did, he’s run as an American who is black, not as a black American. There’s a difference. People would say to me, ‘Gee, it’s great to be the black Secretary of State,’ and I would blink and laugh and say, ‘Is there a white one somewhere? I am the Secretary of State, who happens to be black.’ Make sure you understand where you put that descriptor, because it makes a difference. And I faced that throughout my career. You know, ‘You’re the best black lieutenant I’ve ever seen.’ ‘Thank you very much, sir, but I want to be the best lieutenant you’ve ever seen, not the best black lieutenant you’ve ever seen.’ Obama has not shrunk from his heritage, his culture, his background, and the fact that he’s black, as other blacks have. He ran honestly on the basis of who he is and what he is and his background, which is a fascinating background, but he didn’t run just to appeal to black people or to say a black person could do it. He’s running as an American.”

I asked Powell if Obama’s election would signal the rise of a “post-racial” period in American history. “No!” he said. “It just means that we have moved farther along the continuum that the Founding Fathers laid out for us two hundred and thirty-odd years ago. With each passing year, with each passing generation, with each passing figure, we move closer and closer to what America can be. But, no matter what happens in the case of Senator Obama, there are still a lot of black kids who don’t see that dream there for them.”

8

A few weeks before Election Day, as Obama widened his lead over McCain, I visited New Orleans. The last time I was there, the city had been underwater. Since then, Katrina had obliterated what remained of George Bush’s reputation and promised to shadow the Presidential race of 2008.

Obama had pledged to run a fifty-state campaign, but even his enormous war chest would not pay for futility. Louisiana is rarely a scene of Presidential campaigning, and the state went for Bush in 2000 and 2004. Nevertheless, African-Americans in New Orleans—in Treme, in Mid-City, in the Lower Ninth—watched Obama’s campaign obsessively. They were listening to Tom Joyner, on WYLD; Michael Baisden, on KMEZ; Jamie Foxx, on Sirius. On Canal Street, venders sold the same Obama T-shirts that I’d seen on 125th Street in Harlem. The most popular paired Obama and Martin Luther King. Kids who normally would be wearing oversized throwback sports jerseys wore Obama shirts instead. There were Obama signs in the windows of barbershops, seafood and po’boy joints, and people’s homes.

One night, I went out for a beer with Wendell Pierce, a New Orleanian who made his name as an actor playing the homicide cop Bunk Moreland on the HBO series “The Wire.” Pierce is in his mid-forties. His parents’ neighborhood, Pontchartrain Park, was washed away in Katrina, and he has spent months trying to redevelop the area. Pierce picked me up on Canal Street: he is built like a fireplug and has a double-bass voice. We drove to Bullet’s, a working-class bar on A. P. Tureaud Avenue, in the Seventh Ward. There we met Mike Dauphin, a Vietnam veteran, who sat at our table for a long time talking about his childhood in Jim Crow New Orleans, riding in the back of the bus and going to segregated schools and working at American Can and U.S. Steel. When Katrina came, he was sheltered first at a hospice and then, with thousands of others, at the Convention Center, downtown, “where we had almost no water or food for five days.” He could hardly wait to vote, and he was talking in the same terms as so many older people around town: “I never dreamed in my lifetime that I would see a black man as President of the United States. I was a kid growing up under Jim Crow. We couldn’t drink out of the same water faucet—but now it seems that America has changed.”

Yet you also heard from many people a great wariness, a kind of defense against white self-congratulation or the impression that somehow Obama’s election would automatically transform the conditions of New Orleans and the country. In Treme, a neighborhood adjacent to the French Quarter and arguably the oldest black community in the country, I met Jerome Smith, a veteran of the Freedom Rides in Alabama and Mississippi. These days, Smith runs youth programs at Treme Community Center. On a sunny fall afternoon, we sat on the steps of a former funeral home on St. Claude Avenue that was now operating as the Backstreet Cultural Museum, an apartment-size collection of artifacts from the black bands that played Mardi Gras and second-line parades.

“Obama winning the Presidency breaks a historical rhythm, but it does not mean everything,” Smith said. “His minister did not lie when he said that the controlling power in this country was rich white men. Rich white men were responsible for slavery. They are responsible for unbreakable levels of poverty for African-Americans. Look at this bailout today, which is all about us bailing out rich white men. And there are thousands of children from this city who have gone missing from New Orleans. Who will speak for them? Obama?

Illustration by Barry Blitt Illustration by Barry Blitt

“Obama is the recipient of something, but he did not stand in the Senate after he was elected and say that there is a significant absence in this chamber, that he was the only African-American and this is wrong. He is no Martin Luther King, he is no Fannie Lou Hamer”—who helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, in 1964. “He is a man who can be accommodated by America, but he is not my hero, because a politician, by nature, has to surrender. Where the problems that afflict African-Americans are concerned, Obama can’t go for broke. And the white people—good, decent white people—who voted for him just can’t understand. They don’t have to walk through the same misery as our children do.”

Smith was angry but, as an activist contemplating a mainstream leader, not entirely misguided. It’s inevitable that euphoria will fade. The commemorations will fade. And what will remain is a cresting worldwide recession, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a crumbling infrastructure, a rickety, unjust health-care system, melting polar ice caps—to say nothing of the crisis that comes from out of nowhere.

Colin Powell said that, after a prolonged period in which American prestige abroad has dwindled, Obama would have a “honeymoon period,” which will give him an opportunity to “move forward on a number of foreign-policy fronts.

“That is also something that will perish or diminish over time, as he faces problems and crises,” Powell continued. “If the excitement of the first black President is great, it’ll diminish if he doesn’t do something about the economy, or the economy worsens, or if we suddenly find ourselves in a crisis. As Joe Biden inarticulately said the other day, ‘Something’s coming along.’ No one knows what it is. . . . The next President will be challenged, and how the President responds to that challenge will be more important than what his race happens to be at that moment. But, for the initial period of an Obama Presidency, there will be an excitement, an electricity around the world that he can use.”

9

Forty-nine years ago, a young woman named Charlayne Hunter graduated third in her class from Henry McNeal Turner High School, in those days the most prestigious high school for African-Americans in Atlanta. Charlayne wanted to be a journalist. The University of Georgia had the strongest journalism program in the state, but the university did not accept blacks. Segregation was not something that teen-agers thought to battle in 1959, so Charlayne started making other plans, applying to schools in the Midwest. Yet something was happening in the South: sparked by incidents like Rosa Parks’s historic refusal in Montgomery and the rise of young preachers like Martin Luther King in Atlanta, a movement was developing. And so, at the urging of some black leaders in town, Charlayne and Turner High School’s valedictorian, Hamilton Holmes, challenged segregation at the University of Georgia by sending in applications for admission. Their applications were soon rejected. Then a legal team led by the N.A.A.C.P.’s Constance Baker Motley, and including such young lawyers as Vernon Jordan, championed their case, and, two years later, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were indeed qualified for admission to the University of Georgia and must be allowed to matriculate without delay. They started school in Athens in the winter of 1961. For months, they heard racist taunts as they walked to class. Charlayne had bricks hurled through her windows. But she and Holmes stayed on and they studied and made many friends, and their case became yet another landmark of the civil-rights movement, along with the marches in Selma and Montgomery—and the church bombings and the beatings, and the murders of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King still to come.

Over the past four decades, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, as she has been known for many years, has worked at this magazine, at the Times, for PBS, and for NPR, for which she is now a reporter living in Johannesburg. She is sixty-six. When it was becoming clear a few weeks ago that Barack Obama was on his way to winning the Presidency, we had a series of exchanges about the election. Hunter-Gault was especially impressed by the young Senator’s calm when the political and personal attacks came; she said that it reminded her of what her own family, and the families of so many activists in the civil-rights movement, had instilled in their children as a code of behavior. “Try as I can, I am unable to separate my civil-rights past from my present as a journalist because both of my lives converge at this moment,” she wrote in one note, “because without the movement I wouldn’t be where I am today, and neither would Barack Obama. But because of the movement I was not one of those who thought, Not in my lifetime, not least because I had seen and felt the power of young people, with only their convictions as weapons, tear down the walls of the decades-long system of segregation. And for the first time since the movement I saw a new generation of young people fighting in the same way for change that would bring back the idealism that fuelled our struggles in the streets.” Her sense of triumph, though, was not without anxiety. “Anyone who lived through the civil-rights movement with the threats we were exposed to (in my case, mobs outside my otherwise all-white dormitory shouting ‘Kill the nigger’), and with the losses we suffered—Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and then the ultimate loss, our leader, Martin Luther King—and now to hear reports of people in Republican audiences responding to political attacks on Obama with words like ‘Kill him’: we would be living on another planet not to worry for the young husband, father, and new President of the United States. But, like King, who warned us that ‘I may not be there with you,’ we have to know that we cannot be prisoners of our fears.”

Just a few minutes before eleven last Tuesday night, when Barack and Michelle Obama and their daughters walked out on the stage at Grant Park, and everyone around was screaming, chanting, and waving flags, the long campaign came to an end. Joy was in the faces of the people all around me, there was crying and shouting, but Obama seemed to bear a certain gravity, his voice infused not with jubilation but with a sense of the historical moment.

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” he began.

Obama had done it one last time. Having cast himself in Selma twenty months ago as one who stood on the “shoulders of giants,” as the leader of the Joshua generation, he hardly had to mention race. It was the thing always present, the thing so rarely named. He had simultaneously celebrated identity and pushed it into the background. “Change has come to America,” Obama declared, and everyone in a park remembered until now as the place where, forty summers ago, police did outrageous battle with antiwar protesters knew what change had come, and that—how long? too long—it was about damned time. ♦