Author Richard Rathbone first went to South Africa as the Students’ Visiting Lecturer Fund nominee at Cape Town University in 1976 and returned as Visiting Lecturer to the University of the Witwatersrand in 1979 and then as visiting professor to the universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand in 1998. He has authored, co-authored and edited ten books on African history including African History: A Very Short Introduction. In the following piece Rathbone reveals where South Africa’s true beauty lies and why it is deserves to be “Place of the Year.” You can check out more “Place of the Year” contributions here.

South Africa has been my place of the year on a regular basis since we first got to know each other in 1976. It wasn’t quite love at first sight; rainy winter days in Cape Town spent in chilly rooms with inadequate heating aren’t exactly romantic. But like many who think they are in love, I noticed South Africa’s looks first and learnt to enjoy its company afterwards. If you start, as I did, at the Cape, you first catch your breath by that jagged seascape dominated by Table Mountain and the last land before the South Pole. And at Cape Point I saw my first baboons, and my first sea eagles soaring over the meeting of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, the meeting of hot and cold, ying and yang. But I saw all of it first during apartheid and all that beauty was deformed by very visible cruelties of the system which was older than apartheid. The beaches are scattered with the relics of ship-wrecks and the tragedies of lost lives. Piles of seashells are all that is left to memorialise the old hunter-gatherers, the strandloopers, whose beaches these once were, years before whites started building mile on mile of ugly but expensive beachfront apartments. And the most spectacular view of Table Mountain, that from Blauberg Strand, the Blue Mountain Beach, is spoilt by the grim history of Robben Island inescapably there at the edge of the famous view, a leper colony before it was escape- proof prison. In turn the majestic sweep of Hout Bay was deformed by the fish-canning factory whose sad labourers’ drawn faces betrayed harsh working conditions and poor nutrition.

Further along the coast and then inland are the beautiful winelands, glorious valleys over-shadowed by intimidating mountains. Here again beauty is bittersweet for this world once depended upon slavery and until very recently upon the labour of the descendants of those slaves whose pay was partly taken in alcohol which damaged their and their children’s health. The country’s national flower, the protea, catches the contradictions being both shamelessly pretty while being incredibly hard, irresistible and repellent. I had fallen in love with a tart, a very pretty tart, but a tart with stony heart.

But I learnt fast that the real beauty was and is still to be found less in its scenery and more in its people. In the apartheid years I was thrilled. Inspired by, and even jealous of, the commitment and courage of so many people, black and white, Afrikaaner and African. The cruelty of it all was so obvious; housing in which decent people would refuse to house a dog, the in-your-face insult of “whites only” signage and the ultimate negation of humanity, the idea that people of colour were somehow non-whites, somehow less than human in the eyes of the country’s rulers. The sheer awfulness of that all provoked something more wonderful than cowed, sullen victim-hood. Instead defiance and resistance were suffused with a warm and inclusive humanity. Although it was a state which killed, tortured and incarcerated innumerable people, it and its supporters were made absurd as well as cruel and weakened by the sting of satire, of cartoons, of performances both formal and informal. What often appeared to be obsequious behaviour was frequently audacious and thinly concealed piss-taking at the expense of thoughtless whites. It was and is a sceptical society, a society which refused dictation. And that underlying refusal to internalise the brutal and unintelligent messages of apartheid but instead to imagine and then work for a world without it has informed all that is good about today’s South Africa. So much of that is bound up in the remarkable personality of Nelson Mandela.

Of course South Africa isn’t perfect; all countries that survive revolutions, and the end of apartheid was a revolution, are bound to be imperfect because revolutions are violent affairs which generate all sorts of collateral damage, psychological as well as material. But the real reason why South Africa must be my place of the year is that despite all the many temptations to break with the idea of “a rainbow nation”, the vast majority of South Africa’s continue to subscribe to warmth and humanity, and to reconciliation.

Peggy Pascoe is Professor of History and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. Her book, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, has won two awards from the Organization of American Historians: the Lawrence Levine Prize for the best book on American cultural history and the Ellis Hawley Prize for the best book on political economy or American institutions. In the post below she looks at the actions of Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell.  Read her previous OUPblog post here.

Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell refuses to marry interracial couples. He’s been doing so for years, but it wasn’t until October 2009, when he refused to marry Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay, that his actions attracted attention.

Appalled by Bardwell’s practice of checking with every couple who comes before him to see if they are interracial, then insisting that interracial couples go to other justices of the peace for their wedding ceremonies , Humphrey and McKay, the ACLU, the NAACP, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and Louisiana Senator Mary L. Landrieu have all called for Bardwell’s resignation.

Bardwell insists he hasn’t done anything wrong. “It is my right,” he said, “not to marry an interracial couple.” He doesn’t even understand why Humphrey and McKay were offended by his refusal. “I’m not a racist,” he insists. “I try to treat everyone equally.”

“In some parts of this country,” a friend of mine commented wryly, “it’s still the 1930s.” For most of American history, Bardwell’s refusal to marry an interracial couple would have been standard public policy. Laws against interracial marriage were, in fact, America’s longest-lasting and most fundamental form of race discrimination.

After the first such law was passed by the colony of Maryland in 1664, miscegenation laws thrived for the next three centuries. By the 1930s, 30 states banned interracial marriage, many of them prohibiting whites from marrying Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as blacks.

Courts justified these laws by insisting that interracial marriage was “unnatural,” a claim that became so pervasive that by 1958, 94 percent of Americans told pollsters they opposed interracial marriage. Judges claimed that because the laws punished both the black and white partners to an interracial marriage, they affected blacks and whites “equally.” Like Keith Bardwell, they persuaded themselves that equality somehow demanded that public officials refuse to marry interracial couples.

The U.S. Supreme Court exposed the absurdity of this line of thinking in the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, which declared Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage unconstitutional. “There can be no doubt,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.” Ever since the Loving decision, refusing to marry an interracial couple has been—and despite Bardwell’s protestations, still is—a clear denial of constitutional rights.

In the forty years since Loving, there has been a historic turnabout in public opinion; today most whites and blacks tell pollsters they approve of interracial marriage. There has also been a steady increase in interracial marriages, which now number in the millions. According to some estimates, in 2005 as many as 7% of American married couples were interracial, though the number of marriages between whites and blacks stood at a much more modest 422,000.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that attitudes like Bardwell’s can be safely consigned to the past. A significant segment of several state populations still refuses to recognize that interracial marriage is a legal right. In 1999 and 2000, when South Carolina and Alabama finally got around to removing bans on interracial marriage from their state constitutions, the public vote was roughly 60 percent for removing the bans and 40 percent for leaving them in the state constitutions.

In other words, Keith Bardwell is entirely wrong, but he’s not entirely alone. Perhaps this helps explain why he’s gotten away with his outrageous behavior for so long. In the end, though, it only makes it all the more important that he be removed from public office. The disappointed bride, Beth Humphrey, said it best. “He doesn’t believe he’s being racist,” she said, “but it is racist.”

LeeAnna Keith teaches history at Collegiate School in New York City. She is the author of The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction. In the article below, Keith reflects on the role race may have played in the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama.

Even the most outspoken critics of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize have hesitated to suggest that President Obama was rewarded simply for his good looks. He won the prize “for awesomeness,” at least, according to Republican objectors, who have hesitated to introduce race in their prize critiques. As a student of the history of racial violence in America, however, I embrace the taboo notion that the Nobel committee tapped Obama because he is black. As a symbol of overcoming prejudice, the first black president of the United States embodies an ideal of peace in a still turbulent world.

Commentators have chided the committee’s citation, with its references to diplomacy, multilateralism, and confronting climate change, as being less like a summary of accomplishments than an agenda for the future. Less often, they have noted the committee’s second consideration, that “only very rarely” has a person “captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future” in the way that Obama has. This is veiled Norwegian racial commentary, an acknowledgment of the president’s dazzling personal profile against the backdrop of America’s unjust history.

The racial dimension of the award was not lost on African observers. Kenyans are celebrating the recognition of a “son of Africa” who has inspired the world. In the spirit of “Ubuntu,” South Africa’s president explained, Obama’s mission “celebrates our common humanity.” The Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu credited the award with helping people of color around the world to “walk a little taller.”

“What I actually want to say is, yippee!” exulted Tutu.

Americans should embrace the honor just as unequivocally, and also recognize the prize as recognition of the American electorate’s contribution to the cause of peace. Like Obama, Americans as a society have not yet managed to blunt the force of conflict, weaponry, and planetary degradation. We have made only tentative steps toward repairing our country’s image in the eyes of the world. With the election of Barack Obama, however, the United States transcended its four-hundred year history of racial violence and suppression. We set a standard of openness and opportunity to amaze the world.

Violence as an alternative to political inclusion and equity persisted even in Obama’s lifetime. He was born in the era of the Freedom Rides and church bombings, when a majority of white southerners opposed equal opportunity and a minority dedicated themselves to murder and intimidation. The efforts of white supremacists in the 1960s continued the long tradition of racial violence in the American South, brutality that emerged first amid the desperate struggle of chattel enslavement. Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize helps us to understand slavery as an act of war, the companion of countless sins in the seizure, transport, and management of captives. In behalf of its monstrous cause, the U.S. slaveholding interest persisted in one of history’s most costly wars, claiming the lives of more than 600,000 North and South.

As demonstrated in the history of the Colfax Massacre, the killing of more than one hundred armed African American men in Louisiana in 1873, the violence and repression persisted in the aftermath of Emancipation. The establishment of blacks as voters and as aspirants to elected offices had met the most fierce resistance of the White South establishment. Allied to the Ku Klux Klan and other paramilitary groups, white voters wrenchingly contorted U.S. democratic practices to exclude the terrorized African American electorate.

White supremacy became the special project of government in southern communities and elsewhere: a monopoly on opportunity enforced by legal and extralegal means of black disempowerment.

In the Age of Obama (and his parents), black people and their allies initiated a hopeful reversal of this painful legacy. Americans of his mother’s generation perceived the alternative of cooperative engagement between the races. None pursued this kind of mutuality with more enthusiasm than Stanley Ann Dunham, and no one, by most measures, yielded better results.

Dr. Dunham was educated by anthropology and courted in Swahili and the King’s English by Barack Obama, Sr. Emboldened by the 1960s, Hawaiian Style, and university romance, they lived the principle of love, not war. Best of all, Obama’s mother enlisted her steadfast and resourceful parents, ordinary white folks, in the project of raising her mixed race son in an atmosphere of peace.

White Americans’ ability to repeat the cognitive and emotional leap that the Dunhams achieved has sustained a growing culture of acceptance of and mutual benefit by blacks and whites. Inspired by black leadership, including the first two black American Nobel Laureates, Ralph Bunche and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Americans in Obama’s lifetime have constructed a civil society more than a world away from the Colfax Massacre and other acts of racial violence.

The inauguration of President Obama only weeks before the Nobel deadline was an act of joyful concord that remained fresh in the minds of Norway’s committee of five through the first turgid months of disengagement from the George Bush Era. Obama calls for diplomacy and cooperation in international affairs. Having presumed to overcome symbolically the legacy of racial hatred, Obama’s America might reasonably expect to win the world to the audacity of hope.

Strengthen democracy and human rights around the world by setting an example? Peace Prize Committee to Americans: Yes, you can.

On this day in history, August 19, 1959, Blind Willie McTell passed away.  To honor this great musician we have excerpted his biography from Oxford Music Online’s Encyclopedia of Popular Music.  When you are done reading the post check out some of his music here.

McTell, Blind Willie

b. 5 May 1901, McDuffie County, Georgia, USA, d. 19 August 1959, Almon, Georgia, USA.

Blind from birth, McTell began to learn guitar in his early years, under the influence of relatives and neighbours in Statesboro, Georgia, where he grew up. In his late teens, he attended a school for the blind. By 1927, when he made his first records, he was already a very accomplished guitarist, with a warm and beautiful vocal style, and his early sessions produced classics such as ‘Statesboro Blues’, ‘Mama Tain’t Long Fo Day’ and ‘Georgia Rag’. During the 20s and 30s, he travelled extensively from a base in Atlanta, making his living from music and recording, on a regular basis, for three different record companies, sometimes using pseudonyms which included Blind Sammie and Georgia Bill. Most of his records feature a 12-string guitar, popular among Atlanta musicians, but particularly useful to McTell for the extra volume it provided for singing on the streets. Few, if any, blues guitarists could equal his mastery of the 12-string. He exploited its resonance and percussive qualities on his dance tunes, yet managed a remarkable delicacy of touch on his slow blues. In 1934, he married, and the following year recorded some duets with his wife, Kate, covering sacred as well as secular material.

In 1940, John Lomax recorded McTell for the Folk Song Archive of the Library of Congress, and the sessions, which have since been issued in full, feature him discussing his life and his music, as well as playing a variety of material. These offer an invaluable insight into the art of one of the true blues greats. In the 40s, he moved more in the direction of religious music, and when he recorded again in 1949 and 1950, a significant proportion of his songs were spiritual. Only a few tracks from these sessions were issued at the time, but most have appeared in later years. They reveal McTell to be as commanding as ever, and indeed, some of the recordings rank among his best work. In 1956, he recorded for the last time at a session arranged by a record shop manager, unissued until the 60s. Soon after this, he turned away from the blues to perform exclusively religious material. His importance was eloquently summed up by Bob Dylan in his strikingly moving elegy, ‘Blind Willie McTell’.

After a decade of work Oxford University Press and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute published the African American National Biography(AANB). The AANB is the largest repository of black life stories ever assembled with more than 4,000 biographies. To celebrate this monumental achievement we have invited the contributors to this 8 volume set to share some of their knowledge with the OUPBlog.

Today we have AANB contributor Dr. Pamela Felder who is a Lecturer at Teachers College.  In the article below Felder looks at change.

There is no doubt that the election of President Barack Obama is indelibly etched on the consciousness of America. The theme of change has pervaded popular culture from the music on the radio to the establishment of a new consumer consciousness where those who were taking breaks at Starbucks may now consider the McDonald’s value menu. In the last six months I’ve seen more and more BMW, Mercedes Benz and Hummer vehicles in the McDonald’s drive through. Might this noticeable sign of class acculturation signify change? And, yes I’ve seen them because I go there; I’ve never stopped. I’ll never shun one of America’s trident representations of contemporary American culture. Besides, it’s one of the few companies that has managed to thrive during this bleak economic recession. While I enjoy french fries every now and then, I must give Mickey D’s its props on this profitable feat in such dire times.

Change must be invasive. One of the most important changes I see needing to take place is what I call a change in “generational perceptions.” It speaks to the perception of many African American baby boomers who thought Barack Obama would never be president. You know those who fought and struggled for the GenXer’s to have the privileges their predecessors never had. Take someone like Jesse Jackson who protested with Martin Luther King, Jr., was the first Black man to run for president and has served as one of our nation’s civil rights leaders for the last several decades. Some who have heard Jesse Jackson’s comments about President Obama get angry about his reactions towards his political victory. Who could forget Jesse Jackson’s tears of joy on November 4th, 2008? He demonstrated a joy so profound he couldn’t hold back the tears. However, the larger question is: How does someone like Jesse Jackson reconcile this type of blatant change? I’m sure he is happy that a qualified man is president. But I don’t know what to with his comment: “I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime!” Well, isn’t that why you protested with King? Wasn’t this part of the dream? In the struggle for victory was that dream lost somehow?

I’ve witnessed similar perceptions in my own life. For instance, I was supposed to go to college. In many ways this expectation was set for me by others. Those who set this expectation never imagined I’d go on to get a Ph.D. You see I exceeded their expectations. How do they reconcile that change? I mean isn’t that what change is … exceeding an expectation? Perhaps reconciliation becomes challenging when those who have set expectations for you haven’t exceeded expectations they set for themselves. This could be due to lack of effort or failure.

I’m reminded of comments T.D. Jakes made in one of his sermons, “This is not that … the hardest thing you will ever do in your life is change.” One generation must learn to embrace the success of another. This is a lesson indelibly etched on my consciousness for there is a millennial generation coming behind me.

Since Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day I thought it would be nice to highlight another important civil rights leader, A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. This excerpt comes from The Oxford African American Studies Center. It was written by Edward L. Jr. Lach and published in the African American National Biography.  In celebration of next week’s Inauguration and in commemoration of Black History Month in February, the Oxford African American Studies Center is available to the public for free until March 1st.  Visit here for instructions on how to login or use username:barackobama, password:president.

A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., jurist and civil rights leader, was born Aloysius Leon Higginbotham in Trenton, New Jersey, the son of Aloysius Leon Higginbotham Sr. , a laborer, and Emma Lee Douglass , a domestic worker. While he was attending a racially segregated elementary school, his mother insisted that he receive tutoring in Latin, a required subject denied to black students; he then became the first African American to enroll at Trenton’s Central High School. Initially interested in engineering, he enrolled at Purdue University only to leave in disgust after the school’s president denied his request to move on-campus with his fellow African American students. He completed his undergraduate education at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he received a BA in Sociology in 1949 . In August 1948 he married Jeanne L. Foster ; the couple had three children. Angered by his experiences at Purdue and inspired by the example of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall , Higginbotham decided to pursue a legal career. He attended law school at Yale and graduated with an LLB in 1952 .

Although Higginbotham was an honors student at Yale, he encountered racial prejudice when he tried to find employment at leading Philadelphia, law firms. After switching his sights to the public sector, he began his career as a clerk for the Court of Common Pleas judge Curtis Bok in 1952 . Higginbotham then served for a year as an assistant district attorney under the future Philadelphia mayor and fellow Yale graduate Richardson Dilworth . In 1954 he became a principal in the new African American law firm of Norris, Green, Harris, and Higginbotham and remained with the firm until 1962 . During the same period he became active in the civil rights movement, serving as president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); he was also a member of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission.

Between 1960 and 1962 Higginbotham served as a special hearing officer for conscientious objectors for the United States Department of Justice. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy appointed him to the Federal Trade Commission, making him the first African American member of a federal administrative agency. Two years later President Lyndon Johnson appointed him as U.S. District Court judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania; at age thirty-six, he was the youngest person to be so named in thirty years. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia. He became chief judge in 1989 and remained in the position until his retirement in 1993 .

As a member of the federal bench, Higginbotham authored more than 650 opinions. A staunch liberal and tireless defender of programs such as affirmative action, he became equally well known for his legal scholarship, with more than one hundred published articles to his credit. He also published two (out of a planned series of four) highly regarded books that outlined the American struggle toward racial justice and equality through the lens of the legal profession: In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process, the Colonial Period ( 1978 ), in which he castigated the founding fathers for their hypocrisy in racial matters, and Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process ( 1996 ).

Higginbotham also taught both law and sociology at a number of schools, including the University of Michigan, Yale, Stanford, and New York University. He enjoyed a long relationship with the University of Pennsylvania, where he was considered for the position of president in 1980 before deciding to remain on the bench. Following his retirement in 1993 , Higginbotham taught at Harvard Law School and also served as public service professor of jurisprudence at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In addition, he served on several corporate boards and worked for the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison in both New York and Washington.

Although most of his career was spent outside the public limelight, Higginbotham came to the forefront of public attention in 1991 when he published an open letter to the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Castigating Thomas for what he viewed as a betrayal of all that he, Higginbotham, had worked for, Higginbotham stated, “I could not find one shred of evidence suggesting an insightful understanding on your part of how the evolutionary movement of the Constitution and the work of civil rights organizations have benefited you.” Although widely criticized for his stance, Higginbotham remained a critic of Thomas’s after he joined the Supreme Court and later attempted to have a speaking invitation to Thomas rescinded by the National Bar Association in 1998 .

In his later years Higginbotham filled a variety of additional roles. He served as an international mediator at the first post-apartheid elections in South Africa in 1994 , lent his counsel to the Congressional Black Caucus during a series of voting rights cases before the Supreme Court, and advised Texaco Inc. on diversity and personnel issues when the firm came under fire for alleged racial discrimination in 1996 . In failing health, Higginbotham’s last public service came during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998 , when he argued before the House Judiciary Committee that there were degrees of perjury and that President Clinton’s did not qualify as “an impeachable high crime.” The recipient of several honorary degrees, Higginbotham also received the Raoul Wallenberg Humanitarian Award ( 1994 ), the Presidential Medal of Freedom ( 1995 ), and the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal ( 1996 ). After he and his first wife divorced in 1988 , Higginbotham married Evelyn Brooks, a professor at Harvard, and adopted her daughter. He died in a Boston hospital after suffering a series of strokes.

Although he never served on the Supreme Court, Higginbotham’s impact on the legal community seems certain to continue. A pioneer among African American jurists, he also made solid contributions in the areas of legal scholarship, training, and civil rights.

Carol Holmes is a freelance copyeditor and proofreader who has worked on many projects for Oxford University Press’s African American history and culture reference program. She is an associate editor of The Mailer Review and serves on the board of the Norman Mailer Society. She is also an officer of Friends United Meeting, a Quaker organization that administers overseas projects, among them two hospitals in Kenya.  Her post below, written earlier in the week, struck a chord with us and we asked for permission to reprint.

I wasn’t prepared for what happened to me in the voting booth.

I’d thought it out carefully. I’d vote around 10:30, after the people who worked in offices had had their morning chance. It was a good plan. My polling place is in the lobby of a high-rise housing project in Manhattan. There are about six electoral districts that vote there. My ED had two voting machines. (There was only one for the primary.)

Things looked pretty well organized. First you gave a worker your street address, and she told you which ED you were and what table you had to sign in at. That line was my longest wait–but only ten minutes. I was voter number 388. Spirits were high. One family was there with their children, taking them into the voting booth.

The line for the booths was only a few minutes. My card was collected and the machine was set for me by a fiercely focused African American woman who called me “dear” as she held the curtain for me.

I always forget that I have to cock the machine by throwing the big red lever to the right, so at first I couldn’t get the small toggle by Obama’s name to go down. A moment of panic until I remembered the lever thing.

Click, click, click, click, down the list of candidates, my congresswoman, judges, my state assemblyman–an impressive young man I’m happy is running again.

I stood there for a moment looking at what I had done, looking at the toggles that were turned down beside the names and the Xs in the boxes. I felt two things at once. I felt both deeply centered inside myself and standing outside space and time. It was a moment like no other. I took a long breath and swung the big red lever back to the left.

And then I began to sob. Wracking, shaking sobs welling up from that center I’d been inhabiting, as tears poured from my eyes.

I steadied myself against the lever, as I recall, inhaled, and turned to leave the booth. As I pulled the curtain aside, I met the eyes of the woman who had let me into the booth.

She looked at me. She more than looked at me, she took me in. ”Did you do it?” she said. I nodded. She nodded, too.

And the rest of my tears began to flow. Outside the building, in the sun, I leaned against the brick wall and cried some more until I was able to collect myself.

I spent this spring and summer working on Oxford University Press’s Encyclopedia of African American History from 1896 to the Present. (In other words from Plessy v. Ferguson to Mos Def.) I’ve worked on many of OUP’s African American titles in the past ten years. The set is locked down and ready to go to the presses, except for the open sections that an editorial team is waiting to fill in based on what happens today.

I have worked, as I said, on many of these projects, on the biographical dictionaries, on other encyclopedia sets, on the collected works of W. E. B. Du Bois. It’s been a privilege and an honor and so humbling to learn the life stories of so many astounding men and women. But this encyclopedia of events, half of which happened in my lifetime, sunk me deeper and deeper into despair as I absorbed how pervasive and unacknowledged, unseen, and unknown the racism of this country is.

This morning I got to push back at all that. This morning I got to say–despite what I absorbed growing up with de facto segregation in the public schools of Pennsylvania, where the black kids sat in the back row and rode in the back of the bus–No. This is the person who is best for the job. This is the person I want to represent me to the rest of the world.

“Did you do it?” she asked. I nodded.

Paul Finkelman, Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895, writes on the historic election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States of America. This article first appeared on The Oxford African American Studies Center.

The election is over and America is forever changed. There is no other way to understand the spectacular rise of Barack Obama. When Obama was born in 1961 segregation was still legal in a third of the nation. The majority of blacks lived in the South, where few could vote; almost none went to integrated schools; and they were barred from public facilities, restaurants, hotels, theaters, amusement parks, public parks, and just about everything else. No black person had ever served on the Supreme Court, in a president’s cabinet, or as the elected governor of a state. None had been in the Senate since Reconstruction.

The bloodiest battles of the civil rights movement had yet to be fought and the civil rights martyrs who would define the decade—including and especially Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr.—were still alive. So too were the three young men who would be murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi (Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney); Viola Liuzzo, the mother from Detroit who would be murdered at Selma; and the four young girls who would be blown up in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

The America Barack Obama was born into was a deeply segregated place. The son of a black father and a white mother, his parents could not even have lived in the same house in 1961 in about eighteen different states. Anyone predicting that the son of this union would one day be president would have risked being committed in a mental hospital. The idea of a black president was not just remote, it was impossible to conceive. Only in a science fiction story about an alternative universe could the parents of the baby Barack Obama have thought he would one day be president of the Harvard Law Review, a member of the U.S. Senate, and eventually the primary resident of the White House.
Welcome to the alternative universe of 2008.

An Obama presidency will not end racism. It may in fact lead to some increase in overt racist talk, as those who don’t like his policies will blame them on race. But in other ways, an Obama presidency will change the nature of race relations. Whites who said they would never vote for a black man, in the end did just that. The Republican Party, which played the race card so effectively with Willie Horton in 1988, was unable to do so this time. Fringe Republicans and supporters of McCain offered up offensive and nasty racist characterizations of Obama, including distributing handbills that looked like food stamps with Obama on them. The McCain campaign did not embrace such actions, but neither did it denounce them. In a last desperate effort the McCain campaign focused on Obama’s former preacher, Rev. Wright. But a radical minister of a respected church is no Willie Horton, and no one seemed to be much affected by the effort.

Even as he became the first black president, Obama transcended race. His earliest support did not come from the black community, but from upper middle class Americans of all races, who were charmed by his intelligence and thoughtfulness, and who were anxious to find a new political leader in the new century. Obama campaigned on economics, foreign policy, health care, and jobs. He rarely spoke of inequality or civil rights, not because he is not concerned about them, but because he understood that they were not the central issues of the election. Furthermore, he understood that inequality in health care and job opportunities cannot be overcome until we all have health care and the economy is no longer in free fall. Thus, Obama campaigned on issues that affect all Americans, without regard to race, geography, or class.

Indeed, in the end Obama is not America’s first black president—he is the first American president who happens to be black. The difference is huge.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., editor in chief of The Oxford African American Studies Center, wrote the article below for the site in commemoration of Barack Obama’s successful run for President. To be honest, the piece brought tears to my eyes the entire time I was reading it.  I encourage you to take the time to read all the way through, so you can truly understand what momentous times we are living in.

We have all heard stories about those few magical transformative moments in African American history, extraordinary ritual occasions through which the geographically and socially diverse black community—a nation within a nation, really—molds itself into one united body, determined to achieve one great social purpose and to bear witness to the process by which this grand achievement occurs.

The first time was New Year’s Day in 1863, when tens of thousands of black people huddled together all over the North waiting to see if Abraham Lincoln would sign the Emancipation Proclamation. The second was the night of 22 June 1938, the storied rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, when black families and friends crowded around radios to listen and cheer as the Brown Bomber knocked out Schmeling in the first round. The third, of course, was 28 August 1963, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed to the world that he had a dream, in the shadow of a brooding Lincoln, peering down on the assembled throng, while those of us who couldn’t be with him in Washington sat around our black-and-white television sets, bound together by King’s melodious voice through our tears and with quickened flesh.

But we have never seen anything like we witnessed last night. Nothing could have prepared any of us for the eruption (and, yes, that is the word) of spontaneous celebration that manifested itself in black homes, gathering places, and the streets of our communities when Sen. Barack Obama was declared President-elect Obama. From Harlem to Harvard, from Maine to Hawaii—and even Alaska—from “the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire . . . [to] Stone Mountain of Georgia,” as Dr. King put it, each of us will always remember this moment, as will our children, whom we woke up to watch history being made.

My colleagues and I laughed and shouted, whooped and hollered, hugged each other and cried. My father waited ninety-five years to see this day happen, and when he called last night, I silently thanked God for allowing him to live long enough to cast his vote for the first black man to become president. And even he still can’t quite believe it!

How many of our ancestors have given their lives—how many millions of slaves toiled in the fields in endlessly thankless and mindless labor—before this generation could live to see a black person become president? “How long, Lord?” the spiritual goes; “not long!” is the resounding response. What would Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois say if they could know what our people had at long last achieved? What would Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman say? What would Dr. King himself say? Would they say that all those lost hours of brutalizing toil and labor leading to spent, half-fulfilled lives, all those humiliations that our ancestors had to suffer through each and every day, all those slights and rebuffs and recriminations, all those rapes and murders, lynchings and assassinations, all those Jim Crow laws and protest marches, those snarling dogs and bone-breaking water hoses, all of those beatings and all of those killings, all of those collective dreams deferred—that the unbearable pain of all of those tragedies had, in the end, been assuaged at least somewhat through Barack Obama’s election? This certainly doesn’t wipe that bloody slate clean. His victory is not redemption for all of this suffering; rather, it is the symbolic culmination of the black freedom struggle, the grand achievement of a great, collective dream. Would they say that surviving these horrors, hope against hope, was the price we had to pay to become truly free, to live to see—exactly 389 years after the first African slaves landed on these shores—that “great gettin’ up morning,” on 4 November 2008, when a black man—Barack Hussein Obama—was elected the first African American president of the United States?

I think they would, resoundingly and with one voice proclaim, “Yes! Yes! And yes, again!” I believe they would tell us that it had been worth the price that we, collectively, have had to pay—the price of President-elect Obama’s ticket.

On that first transformative day, when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Frederick Douglass, the greatest black orator in our history before Martin Luther King Jr., said that the day was not a day for speeches and “scarcely a day for prose.” Rather, he noted, “it is a day for poetry and song, a new song.” Over 3,000 people, black and white abolitionists together, waited for the news all day in Tremont Temple, a Baptist church a block from Boston Common. When a messenger burst in, after 11 p.m., and shouted, “It is coming! It is on the wires,” the church went mad; Douglass recalled that “I never saw enthusiasm before. I never saw joy.” And then he spontaneously led the crowd in singing “Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow,” John Brown’s favorite hymn:

Blow ye the trumpet, blow!
The gladly solemn sound
Let all the nations know,
To earth’s remotest bound:

The year of jubilee is come!
The year of jubilee is come!
Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.

At that moment, an entire race, one that in 1863 in the United States comprised 4.4 million souls, became a unified people, breathing with one heart, speaking with one voice, united in mind and spirit, all their aspirations concentrated into a laser beam of almost blind hope and desperate anticipation. The year of jubilee had come!

It is astounding to think that many of us today—myself included—can remember when it was a huge deal for a black man or woman to enter the White House through the front door, and not through the servants’ entrance. The history of notable black visitors to the White House is staggering to consider today.

Paul Cuffe, the wealthy sea captain, shipping merchant, and the earliest “Back to Africa” black colonist, will forever have the distinction of being the first black person, other than a slave, to be invited to the White House for an audience with the president. Cuffe saw President James Madison at the White House on 2 May 1812, at precisely 11 a.m. and asked the president’s intervention in recovering his famous brig Traveller, which had been impounded because officials said he had violated the embargo with Britain. Cuffe, after the Quaker fashion, called Madison “James”; “James,” in turn, got Paul’s brig back for him, probably because Cuffe and Madison both favored the emigration of freed slaves back to Africa. (Three years later, on 10 December 1815, Cuffe used this ship to carry thirty-eight black people from the United States to Sierra Leone.)

Among other historic occasions of black visitors to the White House was a most curious one, on 14 August 1862. Just over a month before he would sign the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln invited five black freedmen to the White House, not to tell them of his plans to emancipate slaves in the seceded Confederacy, but to implore them to take the lead in colonizing the freed slaves completely out of the United States, to a region he had identified in what is now Panama.

Frederick Douglass, who thought Lincoln’s scheme both racist and mad, would visit the White House three times during Lincoln’s presidency, most notably immediately after Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in March 1865, when he responded to a curious Lincoln that his speech had been “a sacred effort.” (Douglass met with every subsequent president at the White House until his death in 1895.) In the spring of 1864, Sojourner Truth became the first black woman to visit a president at the White House on a matter of state, while Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker and confidante, brought a spiritualist to the White House after the Lincolns’ son, Willie, died there in 1862.

After each visit to the White House by a well-known black figure, people celebrated another “victory for the race,” especially when Booker T. Washington, in 1901, became the first black person to dine at the White House, by invitation of Theodore Roosevelt. In 1914 Woodrow Wilson threw the black activist William Monroe Trotter out of the White House for being insolent: Trotter had demanded the desegregation of government clerks! After that incident, black visitors at the White House were few and far between.

Blacks became frequent visitors to Franklin Roosevelt’s White House; FDR even had a “Kitchen Cabinet” through which blacks could communicate the needs of their people. Because of the civil rights movement, Lyndon Johnson had a slew of black visitors, most notably, of course, Dr. King, for consultations and for the signing of civil rights bills. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, I attended a White House reception with so many black political, academic, and community leaders that it occurred to me that there hadn’t been as many black people in the Executive Mansion perhaps since slavery. Everyone laughed at the joke, because they knew, painfully, that it was true.

Visiting the White House is one thing; occupying the White House is quite another. And yet, African American aspirations to the White House date back generations. In 1872 Frederick Douglass became the first black man nominated for vice president, on the ticket of the Equal Rights Party, with Victoria Woodhull. (Their campaign slogan: “Yes! Victoria we’ve selected/For our chosen head;/With Fred Douglass on the ticket/We will raise the dead.”)

Douglass, ever the loyal Republican, supported Ulysses S. Grant. The first black senator, Blanche K. Bruce (who was elected by the Mississippi legislature) received a floor nomination for president at the GOP convention in 1880 and received eight votes for vice president; eight years later, he received 11 votes for vice president at the GOP convention.

However, the very first black man put forward on a ticket as a political party’s nominee for U.S. president was George Edwin Taylor, on the National Liberty Party ticket in 1904. Born in 1857 to a slave father and a free-born Negro mother, Taylor was educated for three years at a Baptist college in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. He became a journalist for the La Crosse Evening Star, a white newspaper, eventually becoming its editor-in-chief and half owner. In 1891 he moved to Iowa; a year later, he was elected an alternate at-large delegate to the Republican National Convention of 1892, where he emerged as “the Negro leader” of the anti-Harrison contingent. When that campaign proved unsuccessful, he joined the Democratic Party and became an alternate delegate to its 1896 convention. He served four years as president of the Negro National Democratic League before becoming a founding member, in 1903, of the National Liberty Party, of which he became the standard-bearer.

Portions of his campaign document could have been written by Barack Obama:
“… in the light of the history of the past four years, with a Republican president in the executive chair, and both branches of Congress and a majority of the Supreme Court of the same political faith, we are confronted with the amazing fact that more than one-fifth of the race are actually disfranchised, robbed of all the rights, powers and benefits of true citizenship, we are forced to lay aside our prejudices, indeed, our personal wishes, and consult the higher demands of our manhood, the true interests of the country and our posterity, and act while we yet live, ’ere the time when it shall be too late. No other race of our strength would have quietly submitted to what we have during the past four years without a rebellion, a revolution, or an uprising.”

The revolution that Taylor goes on to propose, he says, is one “not by physical force, but by the ballot,” with the ultimate sign of the success being the election of the nation’s first black president.

But given all of the racism to which black people were subjected following Reconstruction and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, no one could actually envision a Negro becoming president—“not in our lifetimes,” as our ancestors used to say. The ultimate act of wishful thinking on this matter took the form of a little book written by Joel A. Rogers, published in 1965, entitled “The Five Negro Presidents.” Since Rogers couldn’t imagine that a black person could actually become president, he did the next best thing, painting five presidents black in retrospect!

When James Earl Jones became America’s first black fictional president in the 1972 film, The Man, I remember thinking, “imagine that!” His character, Douglass Dilman, the president pro tempore of the Senate, ascends to the presidency after the president and the speaker of the House are killed in a building collapse, and after the vice president declines the office due to advanced age and ill health. A fantasy if ever there was one, we thought. But that year, life would imitate art: Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm attempted to transform The Man into The Woman, when she became the first black woman to run for president in the Democratic Party. She received 152 first-ballot votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Then in 1988 Jesse Jackson got 1,219 delegate votes at the Democratic convention, 29 percent of the total, coming in second only to the nominee, Michael Dukakis.

The award for prescience, however, goes to Jacob K. Javits, the liberal Republican senator from New York who, incredibly, just a year after the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, predicted that the first black president would be elected in the year 2000. In an essay titled “Integration from the Top Down” printed in Esquire magazine in 1958, he wrote:

“What manner of man will this be, this possible Negro Presidential candidate of 2000? Undoubtedly, he will be well-educated. He will be well-traveled and have a keen grasp of his country’s role in the world and its relationships. He will be a dedicated internationalist with working comprehension of the intricacies of foreign aid, technical assistance and reciprocal trade. . . . Assuredly, though, despite his other characteristics, he will have developed the fortitude to withstand the vicious smear attacks that came his way as he fought to the top in government and politics . . . those in the vanguard may expect to be the targets for scurrilous attacks, as the hate mongers, in the last ditch efforts, spew their verbal and written poison.”

In the same essay, Javits predicted both the election of a black senator and the appointment of the first black Supreme Court justice by 1968. Edward Brooke was elected to the Senate by Massachusetts voters in 1966. Thurgood Marshall was confirmed in 1967. Javits also predicted the election to the House of Representatives of “between thirty and forty qualified Negroes” in the 106th Congress in 2000. In fact, 37 black U.S. representatives, among them 14 women, were elected that year.

All in all, Sen. Javits was one very keen prognosticator. And when we reflect upon the characteristics that Javits insisted the first black president must possess—he must be well-educated, well-traveled, have a keen grasp of his country’s role in the world, be a dedicated internationalist and have a very thick skin—it is astonishing how accurately he is describing the background and character of Barack Obama.

So what does Barack Obama’s election portend for the future of race relations in America, and for African Americans in particular? I wish we could say that Barack Obama’s election will magically reduce the number of teenage pregnancies or the level of drug addiction in the black community. I wish we could say that what happened last night will suddenly make black children learn to read and write as if their lives depended on it, and that their high school completion rates will become the best in the country. I wish we could say that these things are about to happen, but I doubt that they will.

But there is one thing we can proclaim today, without question: that the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States of America means that “The Ultimate Color Line,” as the subtitle of Javits’ Esquire essay put it, has at long last been crossed. It has been crossed by our very first postmodern Race Man, a man who embraces his African cultural and genetic heritage so securely that he can transcend it, becoming the candidate of choice to tens of millions of Americans who do not look like him.

How does that make me feel? Like I’ve always imagined my father and his friends felt back in 1938, on the day that Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling. But ten thousand times better than that. All I can say is “Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound.”