My son and I went to Grant Park on Tuesday night for the election night Barack Obama rally and victory celebration, standing for hours amongst a veritable sea of our fellow Chicagoans. A once in a lifetime world changing event like this was not something I was going to let my son miss. I had figured he might eventually see something like this in his lifetime; I honestly didn't think it would happen in mine. In spite of a personal history that includes collecting money for the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign when I was in junior high school, joining the Black Student Union in my high school--where forty-one of us black, white, and Latinos students locked the principal in his office and subsequently got arrested for demanding, among other things, African American teachers--then joining the Black Panther Party, and participating in untold numbers of demonstrations and marches for a wide range of causes, I had come to measure progress by the slow glacial pace of change that things usually proceed with. It is the cumulative set of historical and never ending agitations that lead to whatever advances take place; each generation is charged with continuing the struggle. Being in that sea of people of every hue, age, and class at Grant Park was an inspiring testimony to Obama's ability to convince people of the power in those simple but self empowering words, "Yes we can," and their own ability to work together across lines of seeming difference and to believe in a collective "we" that has the power to move history forward.  Faith--coupled with collective hard work and the most efficient political campaign ever mounted in the history of modern politics--moves mountains, indeed. 

Barack Obama's ascendency to the presidency is a total global game changing occurrence, as witnessed by the international response to his candidacy both pre and post victory. Beholden to, and directly a result of all of the struggles for justice preceding it, Barack Obama is the living embodiment of Maya Angelou's words: "I am the dream and the hope of the slave." Veteran civil rights activist John Lewis said tonight on 'Oprah' that he felt a sense of divine providence in Obama's campaign, as if "history had chosen him for this moment." The unikely story of his life would seem to give credence to this. Barack Obama's father came to the United States in 1960 as part of an airlift program spearheaded by then senator John F. Kennedy at the urging of Tom Mboya, a Kenyan labour leader and Pan Africanist. The program, which was designed to provide an American education for a selected group of Kenyan students, was modeled on other Cold War era exchange programs intended to bolster the image of the USA on the world stage by supporting developing nations, except that no one had thought to include African students in the deal. As chair of the Senate's commitee on Africa Kennedy committed $100,000 of his own family foundation's money to the program when government funding was not forthcoming. In the presidential election later that year--which pitted Richard Nixon against Kennedy--Nixon decided that Kennedy's largesse might reflect too favorably on the Democratic candidate, and tried to appropriate the program for the Republicans. Kennedy prevailed however, and once the program was implemented one of the first students to get a ticket to come to America from Kenya was Barack Obams, Sr. Eventually attending Harvard he had met Ann Dunham, the woman who became Obama Jr.'s mother, when he arrived . When Obama Jr. was but two years old his father left and returned to Kenya, and Obama's relationship with him was thereafter a minimal one; an empty space left where a father should have been. But the father's simply coming to these shores brought his son and namesake into being, which then brings us to this profound moment. 

So Obama's story begins, in a sense, with John F. Kennedy, and his decision to make an American education available to that group of African students in 1960. There is an eerie symmetry to the fact the Robert Kenndy. Jr. is now reportedly being considered for a post in an Obama administration, possibly bringing this whole story full circle. Caroline Kennedy's early endorsement of Obama was indeed based on her knowledge of her family's connection to Obama through her late father. 

This is, of course, only one piece in an extraordinary story. Here in Chicago it's a very personal story, since Barack has been so much a part of the fabric in this city and in the Hyde Park neighborhood that he and his family call home. From his regular visits to the neighborhood barbershop, to his strong support of the Hyde Park Art Center (he was instrumental in securing state funds for facility's planning for the the new building in which this important neighborhood art center is located), to my own periodic encounters with him in the neighborhood (honking the horn of his black Range Rover and shouting to get my attention), and at the homes of mutual friends, I have always gotten the sense of a deeply engaged person and one profoundly committed to service, family, and positive social change. As another black man with an Ivy League degree and a "funny name" who also doesn't toe the black status quo line, I empathized with Barack as soon as I met him.

In addition to the overwhelmingly profound joy of the moment, and what it says about America's evolution as a 21st century global nation, I am relieved to not have to hear the continuous din of the return of white racist supremacist ideology given public voice in the form of Sarah Palin. In the most insidious way Palin gave racism and xenophobia a spunky and charming face--wink, wink--with her insistence that Barack Obama was not "one of us," and deriding his meaningful work as a community organizer as little more than the empty liberal posturing of someone trying to avoid a real job. Beginning with Bush (who publicly celebrated his own academic mediocrity as a C student) and continuing with McCain (number 894 in a graduating class of 899), and then continuing to Palin's spotty and unambitious academic history, the Republicans have presided over an atmosphere that increasingly celebrated mediocrity and denigrated intellectual achievement, curiosity, sophistication, and an expansive and engaged word view. Eloquence itself became a slur. Bush did not even have a passport when he became president, and likewise Palin at 44 years of age only got her passport barely two years ago. My son had a passport when he was but one year old, then traveling to London. He's been traveling all over the world ever since. How wonderful then to have a president elect whose personal narrative is in itself an embodiment of worldliness, intellectual engagement, curiosity, principal, and a sense of the common good. I couldn't have hoped for a better example for my son than that.

Obama's ascendency comes, sadly, at the moment of passing of Studs Terkel, the legendary author-radio host-activist and deeply devoted Chicagoan who passed away this past weekend, the same weekend which saw the loss of Barack Obama's grandmother Madelyn Dunham. Terkel was a humanist whose books--particularly Working and Race made an early impact on me with their moving first person narratives that allowed everyday people to hold forth in their own voices about the lives they were living, talking about what they thought and felt. These personal and wide ranging stories would never have entered into the public sphere but through Terkel. The multifarious people holding forth in Terkel's narratives have now found a shining voice in Madelyn Dunham's grandson Barack Hussein Obama, Chicago's very own.