by Femi Ajetunmobi

And I cried!

I saw Jesse Jackson in the crowd weeping. I saw Oprah Winfrey sobbing in the crowd on the shoulders of strangers. I saw the young and the old, blacks and whites and coloreds, rich and poor, famous and the unknowns, holding hands and hugging, screaming and crying, all at the same time, completely overwhelmed by the enormity of the moment. I held my emotions in check during all these. I saw people celebrating in Sydney, Australia. I saw people jumping up and down in Nairobi, Kenya. I saw people displaying unmitigated joy in Hong Kong. From the East coast to the West coast, from North America to Africa, every one recognized the significance of the moment. Still, I held my emotions in check.

Never before have I seen so many people gathered in one place – like they did in Grant Park, Chicago, that night – reveling in the magic of the moment. Never before have I seen the world come together in the moment – like we all did on Tuesday night – to celebrate a night that would be talked about from generations to generations and for centuries until the end of time. It was one of those moments that we would all be able to say, years down the line, that we knew exactly where we were when Barack Hussein Obama was elected the first black leader of the free world!

And then I cried. 

I cried when he gave his Victory Speech. I cried when he told the story of Ann Nixon Cooper, the 106 year-old black woman, whose lifetime has traversed the Great Depression, two World Wars, both the Vietnam and Korean Wars, two Iraqi Wars, 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, and the great Wall Street crash of 2008. She lived through the Civil Rights era – an era that was marked by “the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that ‘We Shall Overcome’.” She witnessed the abuse that was meted out to people simply because of the color of their skin. She lived through the systematic persecution of her race, the gross injustices, the torture, and all the lynching. She lived in an era where signs like “Whites only” and “Dogs and Niggers are not allowed here” were commonplace. She lived in an era when people like her weren’t allowed to vote – initially because of the color of her skin, and later because of her gender. She survived all these but she never thought that she would see the day when a person that looked like her would ascend to the highest office in a country that has meant so much to her but that also had taken so much away from her. She cried – she told Obama – the day she went to the polls to vote for him for the presidency of the United States of America. She never thought that a day like this would ever happen. 

I cried also because I never thought that in my lifetime I would see someone of my race become the leader of the free world.

All that changed on Tuesday, November 4, 2008.

History would come to recognize that day as an important landmark in civilization. I make bold to proclaim that historian would tell of an era that would be divided into the period before Barack Obama (BB) and the period after Barack Obama (AB). This period in history would always be defined by what Barack Obama was able to accomplish on that historic day in November. (Like today, Sunday, November 9, 2008, would be 5 Days AB.) These are interesting times and I am immensely proud and thankful for the privilege to live in a time like this and to be part of this momentous occasion.

Martin Luther King Jr. made us believe that this could be done. Barack Hussein Obama showed us how it SHOULD be done and made us believe long and strong enough for us to work for that dream to become a reality. He told us in that iconic speech that helped launch him onto the national stage at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts in July 2004 that “there is no liberal America or a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is no red states America or blue states America. There is the United States of America.” He didn’t believe in the division of the country along racial or ideological lines and he proved that in this election by going into, campaigning, and winning states that hadn’t voted Democrat in several decades – or, in some cases, never! 

He won Virginia! Virginia was the old capital of the Confederacy and it was in this state that Jefferson Davis once famously – or infamously – said that “the negro is only useful as a slave.” But that never deterred Obama from believing that he could carry the state. Which he did. He won in Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, and Ohio. In fact, he won all the so-called battleground states with the sole exception of Missouri – whose final results have not been officially declared and where he trails Senator John McCain by less than 6,000 votes.

No one thought this was possible! He has won 65,431,955 of the popular votes (as at this moment), which represents 53% of the total votes cast and made him the first Democrat to win more than 50% of the total votes cast since President Jim Carter did so in 1976. He won the Electoral College votes by 364 to Senator John McCain’s 163 – with Missouri’s 11 Electoral College votes still to be decided. He beat Senator John McCain by 7 points in the popular vote. He won about 40 million of the white votes. He got more of the white votes than John Kerry did in 2004, than Al Gore did in 2000 and even more than Bill Clinton did when he won the presidency twice! He won in all the major demographics except in the white votes and in the elderly people over 65. 

This election victory does not mean that we have completely subjugated all the evils in the world or have completely resolved all our racial differences. We would be naïve to think that way. What this victory symbolizes is that this is the dawn of a new era. This is a brand new day. THIS IS OUR TIME! And we have our own destiny in our hands and we can decide, by ourselves, what direction we want to steer this ship and how we would like our future to look like. Like Barack Obama said in his Victory Speech, “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.” The more things change, the more they stay the same. But the more we decide to work hard collectively for a common goal the easier and quicker it would be for us to reach Canaan. We have not reached Canaan yet, let’s not make any mistake about that, our path only got clearer and easier.

It took the Israelites 40 odd years to reach the Promised Land. Isn’t it ironic that 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. this country has its first black President? The biblical Moses wasn’t able to lead the Israelites to the land of Canaan but he showed them the way and a blueprint of how to get there. Martin Luther King Jr. couldn’t get the black race to the Promised Land but he did show us how to get here. Barack Hussein Obama has gotten us here and, with our support, would lead us to the Promised Land! I have a feeling that Martin Luther King Jr. would be looking down on us right now, with a smile on his face, saying, “My dream has come true.”

Barack Hussein Obama worked hard for this. From the moment he declared his intention to run for the highest office in the land – on February 10, 2007, in Springfield, Illinois – he faced long and tough odds. No one gave him a chance. No one thought he could beat the establishment candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the primaries. No-one, except Barack Obama and his family. Blacks all over the world had their doubts and cynicism. I didn’t think he stood a chance against Hillary Clinton and I even expressed this sentiment to a friend around April this year when I told her that I believe America would vote for a white female President before they vote, if ever, for a black President. I WAS WRONG! I take solace in the words of Sting in his hit song “Englishman in New York” where he said: It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile. I was ignorant and I am man enough to admit it. I severely underestimated the people’s desire for qualitative changes in their lives and I also forgot the fact that when one is destined for greatness, like Obama is, nothing, no-one and no amount of aspersion or vilification would stand in one’s way. Jeremiah Wright would not be the cog in the wheel of your progress, no matter how hard your detractors try to whip up those sentiments. They vilified him! They called him all the hideous names in their book – from a terrorist to an Arab to a Socialist to a Communist to a Marxist to someone who did not have the interest of HIS country at heart – but nothing they did could derail his train. It was – quite simply – his time!

He, like he has said several times, was “never the likeliest candidate for this office.” He was “the skinny kid with the funny name.” Growing up in Hawai’i, his first name was so strange his grandparents took to calling him “Barry.” And like he joked at the Alfred E. Smith Dinner in New York City two weeks before the elections, “I got my middle name from somebody who, obviously, didn’t think that I’d ever run for President.” Let’s put this in the right perspective for a minute here: Did anyone ever think that someone named Barack Hussein Obama would EVER stand the chance of running for the presidency of the greatest nation on earth? And winning? We would be lying if we said we did. 

He was a virtual political unknown before he gave THAT speech in July 2004 at the DNC. His meteoric rise from an Illinois State Senator to the President of the United States of America in 4 short years belongs only in fantasy writings. He stuck to Barack, instead of Barry, that he was legally entitled to change to, because he, like his parents, believed “that in a tolerant America, your name is no barrier to success.” I guess he was all alone in that belief – until now. Barack Obama believed in his dream and he was vindicated in the end. He believed in a tolerant America and he was justified. Winning the Iowa caucus in January 2008 made every one to sit up and take notice. Winning in a state with about 97% white population validated his candidacy and, for the first time, made skeptical black people, like you and I, to start believing that this could actually happen. The road was long, rough and tough but he stuck to his conviction and never wavered from his beliefs. He made us believe because he believed. He saw this day long before we did. This is his moment. He is the chosen one! He was told by Senator Dick Durbin, the Senate Majority Whip, also from Illinois – when Barack Obama sounded him out for advice when he was prevaricating about running – that you pick your moment sometimes and other times the moment picks you. The moment picked him – and he responded. 

He is very special. He is a once-in-a-generation kind of leader and we are privileged to have him.

He is our man. He is our destiny. He is our history. He is our future. He is our new President.

I pray that God should protect him and his family. That God should give him the strength and the wisdom to lead us in this turbulent and evil world that we now live in. That he should know right from wrong, good from evil, and should always do what is right and just in the eyes of God and man and never do what would bring shame on him, his family, and all the people who have placed their trusts in his hands. I pray that he has the courage to fight for the poor and the down-trodden when he takes power. I pray that he has the ability to continue to inspire us to do what is right because it is amazing what a group of people could do when adequately motivated. (Anyone that said words don’t matter would feel stupid, I’m sure, right now.) I pray that he would be a symbol of pride for us all in decades to come and that we all – that supported him, campaigned for him, volunteered for his campaign, donated to his campaign and voted for him – would look back on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, and say assertively and without equivocation: YES, WE DID THE RIGHT THING!

Maya Angelou was asked, by Robin Roberts of “Good Morning America,” what would be the first thing she would say to Barack Hussein Obama if she meets him. She said two words: THANK YOU!

Thank you for making this possible. Thank you for believing, when we all doubted, that this could be done. Thank you for giving us hope and the belief that anything is possible if we work hard for it. Thank you for showing us that there shouldn’t be a limit to our ambition. Thank you for telling us that we no longer have excuses for our ineptitude – that we only fail because we choose to be failures and not because of a system that conspires against us. Thank you for making every single American – White, African, Hispanic, Asian, and Native – believe that they too could one day become the President of the United States of America and every single citizen of the world believe that could be whomever they aspire to be.

Thank you. 

And welcome to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, DC 20006.

Femi Ajetunmobi.
©2008.