President Barack Obama's inaugural address may well be remembered as one of the rare moments in history where substance matched symbolism. On January 20, 2009 the very aesthetics of American democracy changed, both symbolically and substantively, through the acension of a black man to the nation's highest office.

In his first post-election press conference, Barack Obama self-deprecatingly referred to himself as "a mutt," a characterization that reflects a longstanding effort to forge a meaningful synthesis around the disparate parts that contour his personal identity as well as America's. Obama's biography and campaign forthcoming presidency managed to turn the nation's largely tumultuous racial history into a coherent political narrative that grappled with American democracy's troubling paradoxes and redemptive possibilities. In a very real sense the Obama era represents the culmination of America's postwar Civil Rights Movement where ordinary citizens, sharecroppers, preachers, and young people demonstrated, marched, and at times, died, for freedom's cause. The years between 1954's Brown Supreme Court desegregation decision and the passage of the Voting Rights act in 1965 have come to be regarded as the heroic years of America's civil rights struggles. This era indelibly shaped Obama whose decision to become a community organizer after college was inspired by the iconic images of the civil rights era's high tide that captured his youthful imagination, punctuated by the faces of activists singing freedom songs, civil rights workers canvassing in the Mississippi Delta, and brave college students igniting a sit-in movement by simply asking for service at an all-white lunch counter in the Deep South. But there is another, largely unacknowledged, tradition that Obama will carry to the White House. Obama addressed the fundamental contradiction of American democracy, one that makes his election all the more remarkable, in his now famous race speech in March 2008. In "Toward a More Perfect Union" Obama steadfastly maintained his personal belief in the resiliency of American democracy while acknowledging the depths of black anger and white resentment that contour contemporary race relations. The Black Power Movement is most often characterized as a wrong turn away from the civil rights where gun toting black militants practiced politics without portfolio and fueled a white backlash that, until recently, has haunted American politics. But such a view is largely inaccurate and ahistorical. Black Power activists advocated bread and butter political issues that called for jobs, good schools, labor and welfare rights, and educational opportunity. Even as the Voting Rights Act helped provide a context for a new generation of black politicians, Black Power activists helped create the first era of black urban political machines in cities such as Newark, Detroit, and Atlanta. The movement's most iconic spokesperson, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) was a civil rights warrior arrested dozens of times between 1961 and 1966 for promoting democracy in the Deep South. Before Martin Luther King's famous April 4, 1967 anti-war speech at Riverside Church in New York, Carmichael was among the nation's most vocal and effective anti-war speaker, a status that produced unprecedented surveillance from the FBI, White House, and various domestic and international security agencies. By the mid-1970s and early 1980s Black Power politics receded from the national arena, a byproduct of government harassment, organizational failures, and the movement's own flaws and shortcomings. But its legacies abounded in robust Black Studies programs and departments, cultural and literary displays, and in coalitions that aided the election of black politicians in places like Chicago in 1983. It was Harold Washington's surprising ascent to mayor that helped fuel Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential bid. It was within this historical and political context that a young Barack Obama arrived in Chicago and, several years later, became an enthusiastic member of Trinity United, a church that, with echoes of Black Power era militancy, labeled itself as "unapolgetically black and Christian."

Obama's ability to frame a coherent vision for racial reconciliation in Philadelphia ultimately rescued his candidacy from disaster. History may well judge Obama's administration in part on his ability to turn eloquent words into bold policy that unites the many strands of American identity, hopes, and dreams into a singular national tapestry that renews the expansive vision of democracy that emboldened civil rights workers and Black Power militants to dream of a black man in the White House.