Americans hail first black president

Source: Agencies  |   2008-11-6  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

ANTHONY Shuford used to ride the No. 32 bus past the White House and wonder if the president had any idea what his life was like. After voting for Barack Obama, he said he would never feel the same about that house, or his country.

In cities that have written the long, complicated history of race in America - places where slaves were bought and sold, where a Declaration of Independence prematurely called "all men" equal, where black students faced segregationist mobs - voters black and white spoke of joy, hope and utter disbelief.

In the often forgotten neighborhood of Anacostia, people spoke of history - slavery and separate water fountains. They reached in vain for adjectives that were big enough - excited, ecstatic, astonishing. Some just leaned out of car windows and shouted: "Obamaaaaaa!"

It's less than 8 kilometers from the White House. Shuford remembered going home from work and thinking: "I'm coming across the bridge to a poverty-stricken neighborhood, to abandoned buildings, knowing right across the bridge is Capitol Hill."

Now he feels like heading back across that bridge to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, "just to support and rejoice."

"What did Martin Luther King say? We're going to the mountaintop? That's how I feel," said Delores Oliver, standing in the parking lot of the hilltop Washington View Apartments, with the famous part of Washington spread out below.

Millions of voters who swamped churches and schools and community centers on polling day paused to celebrate what generations before had been brutalized for, died for and only dreamed of: voting a black man into the White House.

"Look where black people came from," said Dasmin Hollaway, a black college student, not far from where nine students faced down angry crowds and the governor of Arkansas in 1957 to integrate Central High School in Little Rock.

"We started off as slaves," Hollaway said after voting for Obama. "Now look."