66% of Young Voters Went for Obama: What Minorities and Black Americans Are Saying About the President Elect

Ross, cast her own vote near her home in Pittsburg. She walked home with a flag in her hand and a song on her lips. Hallelujah, she sang, over and over. Hallelujah.

"It's like Martin Luther King's dream coming true. Because he said it was going to happen," she said. "We've came a long way. A lot of people are still narrow-minded, but we have come a loooong way for him to come this far. People have woken up."

Across the Bay Area, black citizens of all ages and classes shared Ross's elation. For some, the happiness was tempered by bitter experience; others were too overjoyed to see anything but hope. Jean Carey, 44, an administrative assistant in Oakland, recalled her brothers who died before seeing these days, but also the aunts in Texas who, at 90, managed to get out and vote today.

"I started thinking about all of my relatives who couldn't have done this, and I started getting really emotional and crying," said Carey, weeping again at a boisterous celebration at the Everett and Jones restaurant in Oakland. Across the room, Benten Brown, 62, hoisted a sign that read, "This day is for Dr. King and all those who fought and died for the equal rights of all people."

"I'm a Jim Crow baby," said Brown, who said his grandfather was a slave in Georgia. "This day is an incredible feeling for me and everybody."

Those who study race and politics said there is little in history that serves as a comparison for Tuesday's events.

"It's the second Emancipation Proclamation. This is about their really feeling American. This is about their claims to citizenship," said Fred Harris, director for the Center on African American Politics and Society at Columbia University.

Black Americans have seen enormous changes in the 40 years since The Chronicle published Johnnie Marie Ross's story under the headline "A Ghetto Eulogy." Lashawn James, 29, said that when his mother was born in South Carolina, most blacks were denied the right to vote. Today, her son has an MBA from Stanford and is working at a private equity firm in Oakland.

"To look from where she was to where we are now is what makes this very special. Because of the sacrifices she had to go through to put me where I am," he said.

His friend and classmate, Sean Haywood, 30, said the election of Obama "means we are all justified in dreaming bigger from now on. It doesn't necessarily mean everything is attainable, but it means we certainly have the right to dream."

But does this election fulfill King's dream?

"We're so far away from fulfilling (King's) dream that it's tragic," said Shelby Steele, a scholar on race at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "The reality on the ground is that the black-white achievement gap is worse than it ever was, 55 percent of all federal prisoners are black, the illegitimacy rate is over 70 percent. So the reality is there is no parity between blacks and white."

Nevertheless, many people see hope in Obama's election.

"To me, Obama's election is a step forward in the direction I think we need to go," said Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale and author of "Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream."

To Sleeper and some other academics, the election of Obama is the latest step in a long journey for black Americans, from the end of slavery and the beginning of the civil rights movement, through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Shirley Chisholm's run for president in 1972, Jesse Jackson's runs in 1984 and 1988, and President Bush's appointments of Colin Powell and then Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state.

"There is a generational change," Sleeper said. "I think it will have a profound effect. The president of the United States ... it really is somebody people see as embodying America."