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31 3-V Day: Victory, Validation, Vindication On that historic January 20, 2009—the day Barack Obama was inaugurated as our forty-fourth president—America was in a celebratory mood. And for good reason. Obama’s victory on November 4, 2008, had not only crashed through yet another racial barrier, it had offered great hope for millions of Americans, most of whom felt good about themselves and had high hopes for their futures. I felt pretty good myself. I told a reporter from my hometown newspaper, The Item, “This is the greatest day, I think, in the history of the country.” It was the same newspaper I used to read growing up, and it was the paper I searched for articles for the daily report to my parents about an important event that took place that day. This would have been a good one. I told the reporter, Mary Dolan, “It is almost incredible the feelings I have been having all week.” Down deep, two words kept rushing into my mind: validation and vindication. I saw Barack Obama’s victory as a validation of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The word “vindication” kept coming to mind as well. Vindication of those who adhered to the dream; vindication for the sacrifices made by my parents and other parents of their generation and the generations that preceded them; vindication for the struggles that took place on all the Amelia Streets of our nation by young men and women who risked their lives and well-being for the cause of human and civil rights; vindication for all those Americans who fought for the right to vote and put their lives and well-being on the line. I also felt personally vindicated. I felt vindicated for counseling my children to believe in themselves and this nation’s promise. I felt vindicated for having maintained the faith of my father and the tenacity of my mother. I felt vindicated for having told all those students I had taught that they could grow up to be anything they wanted to be if they stayed in school, studied hard and stayed out of trouble. There were many times when I wondered if maybe I were being a little too optimistic and idealistic. Suddenly I realized I had been telling them the truth after all, that the shackles of limited expectations had been removed from the lives of black Americans. Obama’s historic victory validated King’s dream, and vindicated those who had held fast to that dream. November 4, 2008, was truly 3-V Day. On that cold January day, I stepped out from the canopy at the West Front of the Capitol building and into the bright sunlight that flushed the inaugural platform, 282 The Age of Obama having been appointed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to lead the congressional delegation into the history books. I took my seat not more than fifteen feet from where Barack Obama would take the oath of office and passed the time chatting with retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Mrs. O’Connor had made history herself as the first woman ever appointed to the United States Supreme Court. I looked out over the throngs of Americans who were gathered on the mall to observe the confluence of civil rights fulfillment and political triumph. I wondered what kind of speech we would be hearing in just a few minutes, and I thought back to some of those memorable speeches of the past—the stirring, almost poetic words of John F. Kennedy, the resolute words of Franklin Roosevelt, and the challenges of Harry Truman. I thought back to the spiritual defiance of Martin Luther King, who had spoken so powerfully four decades earlier at the other end of the mall, the very spot where millions of his adherents now celebrated. The speech we heard that day was none of those, and perhaps it should not have been. Like FDR, Obama was trying to lead us out of an economic misery that was driving millions of people into desperation. But this was not a stem-winding oration, as Roosevelt delivered in 1932. The new president spoke to his twenty-firstcentury audience in a conversational, reassuring tone in words of friendship and familiarity . “The challenges facing us,” he said, “are serious and they are many. They will not be easily met or in a short span of time. But know this, America. They will be met.” As...

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