BY MICHAEL PAUL WILLIAMS
Times-Dispatch Staff Writer

Johnnie Taylor shook her head, raised her arms and mouthed a silent prayer as the band struck up “Hail to the Chief” for President Barack Obama.

Taylor, 60, recalled her youth as a civil-rights activist who was yanked from a lunch-counter stool during a Woolworth’s sit in. The conflict resolution trainer at the Richmond Peace Education Center sees Obama’s presidency as the product of divine intervention.

“When things like this happen, it’s not by accident. It’s not by history. It’s an ordained event,” she said. “I know man had to vote, but God made this happen.”

Kayla Hill-Jones was born a half-century after Taylor, but bore a psychic load no less onerous. For the Glen Allen Elementary School fourth-grader, yesterday meant this: “That I can accomplish anything, even though I’m black.”

Taylor and Kayla were among three dozen people who watched Obama’s inauguration at Highland Park’s Fire House 15 as they washed down chili, cornbread, tossed salad and brownies with sweet iced tea. The fire station-turned-eatery is run by Boaz & Ruth, a nonprofit that seeks to transform Highland Park, serve as a community bridge and rebuild the lives of formerly incarcerated men and women.

As I listened to a 10-year-old child describe her brave new world, it brought to mind the old one of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Upon telling his young daughter that the Atlanta amusement park Funtown was closed to black children, he could see “ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky.”

Those clouds have hovered over the collective mental sky of African-Americans throughout the nation’s history.

Yesterday, the skies cleared.

The forecast for America is another matter. The nation’s helm has been handed to an African-American during one of the most turbulent times in our nation’s history.

Adria Scharf, director of the Richmond Peace Education Center, described yesterday as “disorienting,” and indeed, there was a magical aura that bordered on surreal. You might say the country has found its bearings after straying wildly off course from the grand ideals charted in its founding.

The journey toward that ideal is far from complete. But perhaps for the first time, many of us understand how King felt in the famous speech that foreshadowed his death. Like him, we don’t know what will happen now. There are difficult days ahead. But that doesn’t matter as much anymore. We’ve been to the mountaintop.

“I’m 50,” said Ruth Cosby, a Boaz & Ruth graduate who supervises its furniture store at Third and Main streets. “I thought I would never see this. I just couldn’t stop crying. I think this is going to unite us as a country, and we’re going to realize Dr. King’s dream.”

If that’s the case, it’s children such as Kayla who stand to inherit a nobler nation.

Kayla’s parents, Stan Jones and Regina Hill, are supporters of Boaz & Ruth. “We wanted her to experience giving instead of receiving — of serving others,” her mother said of Kayla.

Kayla wore a red and blue T-shirt that featured a portrait of the new first family inside the presidential seal.

“She said she wanted to be the first African-American president,” her mother said, chuckling. “I told her she could be the first woman.”

BY AMY DOMINELLO AND SEAN MUSSENDEN
Media General News Service

WASHINGTON – For decades, Mutter Evans organized a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in Winston-Salem, N.C. This year, she organized two busloads to travel to the nation’s capital for Barack Obama’s inauguration.

For the first black president to take the oath of office the day after the MLK holiday is especially gratifying, said Evans, 55.

“It’s perfect timing. It’s like the planets lined up,” she said. “Without Dr. King and others who worked in the movement, the way would not have been paved for Barack Obama.”

Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president in Denver in August on the 45th anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

On Tuesday, Obama will be sworn-in as president on the West Front of the Capitol, two miles away, at the opposite end of the National Mall. Crowds of perhaps 2 million are expected to reach the Lincoln Memorial.

The connections are not lost on blacks who say they never imagined they would live to see a black person become president. Some black political leaders see Obama as an illustration of the faith King had in the American people and its political system.

Obama’s election showed what America can do, said former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, who was the first black elected governor in the country.

“Can America change? Has there been progress?” said Wilder. “Yes. My God, yes.”

For many, Obama’s inauguration represents the culmination of decades of work towards the advancement of civil rights. For Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., this is a time to remember King and other black leaders, such as the late Thurgood Marshall and Rosa Parks.

“I knew these people,” said Clyburn, a civil rights activist in the 1960s. “They’ve long since left us, but I’m here because of their sacrifice. …What I think about is all that these people did, step by step, inch by inch, that led to Barack Obama being president of the United States.”

Some who were active in the civil rights movement in the South say they want to experience the moment when their work reaches its pinnacle.

Addie Green, 60, who grew up in rural Mississippi, helped organize a bus trip to Washington and said she wants to be able to tell her grandchildren about it.

“I worked too hard with the NAACP over the years to see this change happen,” said Green of Bolton, Miss.

“I’m coming to Washington, D.C., to be able to witness the work that we have done,” she said.

For some a generation removed, the moment is a time to honor the work of those like Green. David McGill, a 34-year-old lawyer from Miami, came not only to witness the historic moment himself but as a testament to family members who grew up in the Jim Crow South and experienced oppression first-hand.

If they could stand in line for hours to vote, he said, he could travel to Washington and stand in the freezing cold for this significant event.

“I’m witnessing something monumental, and I’m bringing all the McGills with me,” he said.

And for those even younger, the moment is more an indication of political change. Makeda Johnson of Atlanta said her 15-year-old daughter Saramaat Imhotep helped register voters and has been passionate about the change Obama could bring to the country and the world.

Johnson had no intention of coming to the inauguration until her daughter announced in mid-December, “I’m going.”

“As she communicated how important it was to be here, I had to acknowledge that this was very important to her generation as the March on Washington was to ours,” Johnson said, after touring the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum on historic U Street in Washington.

Jerry L. McCombs, president of the Catawba County, N.C., branch of the NAACP, hopes Obama’s election resonates with young people.

McCombs, 47, of Newton, N.C., was in elementary school shortly after schools were desegregated in North Carolina. He was the only black in his third-grade class, and when a classmate passed out party invitations, she skipped him.

“She said, ‘Sorry. My mama don’t want no colored people at my house’ and continued to pass out invitations,” McCombs said.

Today, King’s message of equality has become real, and McCombs is in Washington to watch it in person.

“Obama’s inauguration shows that we can teach our young people, regardless of skin color or religion, that you can do whatever you want, if you put your mind to it,” he said.

On the 45th Anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, Congressman John Lewis of Georgia set the stage by stating that “We prove that a dream still burns in the hearts of every American, that this dream was too right, too necessary, too noble to ever die.”

Senator Barack Obama delivered the speech that he needed to deliver last night.  He looked like the President of the United States standing at that podium.  He spoke about big themes but also laid out a plan for America’s future.  He clearly is ready to lead us forward and I am ready to do whatever I can to get him there.

I was touched by the speech but even more touched by the reactions of some of my fellow North Carolina delegates.  I watched the African American delegates who had participated in the Civil Rights Movement before I was even born see the culmination of their dreams come true.

There were tears in their eyes as Senator Obama spoke his first words accepting the nomination for President of the United States.

I was there to witness history last night, but the real work begins now.

This campaign is going to be hard fought from the grassroots to the grasstops.  People are energized, people are voting for the first time and people are participating in our great democracy.