Unthinkable is possible
My father was born in rural Alabama in the 1920s, was drafted into World War II as a college freshman, and returned home four years later to a state in which he could not register to vote.
My mother was also a product of the segregated South. The tyranny was not quite as bad in Florida as in Alabama, but Alabama was hardly a bastion of racial equality.
I have four aunts in Montgomery, Alabama. They are in their 70s and 80s now. They don't just remember the famous bus boycott of 1955, they walked and carpooled through it and watched friends get fired by their white bosses for participating in it.
I thought a lot about all of them on Tuesday, but especially about my parents, who didn't live to see Election Day 2008. They would have been shocked, not to mention elated, by the election of the first black president.
They would, in fact, have been surprised by this entire remarkable and unlikely political season, in which Barack Obama's election was less surprising to many people than his getting nominated in the first place.
A friend in Washington captured my own sense of wonder Tuesday morning. He e-mailed to say that as he cast his vote he got tears in his eyes thinking of his grandmother in Alabama. I could easily imagine the feeling.
Yet Obama's win, momentous as it was, wasn't just about him. Almost as striking as his victory was the sight of millions of people lining up to make history.
Even here in Massachusetts, a state where the outcome could not have been any less in doubt, some people were lining up before the polls opened. They were anxious to make their voices heard, in reaction, perhaps, to feeling for years that their concerns about their government were largely ignored.
Like many people, I got a flood of calls and e-mails from friends and acquaintances who were struggling to put into words what Tuesday meant to them. Not all of them had supported Obama early in the primary season, or at all. But they found their political differences overshadowed by the thrill of seeing deeply held assumptions upended. There was a thrill in the air, in the idea that things we've always known to be true can be wrong.
The airwaves have been full of people attempting to answer the question of what it will mean to have a black president. Many commentators have pointed to the symbolism of the moment. Depending on who's talking, it demonstrates that we have transcended our racial history or maybe that we have just taken a big step toward transcending it. It means, perhaps, that we have entered some sort of "post-racial" utopia.
I started Tuesday thinking about the candidates, especially Obama, but ended it pondering their supporters. I thought, too, about civil rights history. The civil rights movement was made possible by hundreds of thousands of people who had simply had enough and demanded change. That was at the root of its great appeal and its transformative power. Though it has been reduced in the retelling to the handful of famous people who led it, those who lived through it will tell you it was about more than that.
We'll see what Obama's victory means for our politics. He has run an inspiring campaign, which makes me think he will be a fine president, but we'll see.
My great hope though, is that we, as a nation, can hang onto the sense that the unthinkable is now possible. All great revolutions start from within, from a wildly irrational sense of heightened possibility. Tuesday we saw that same kind of imagination at work. Black Americans have not always had that sense of hope, and they have not been alone in their despair. But hopelessness was routed Tuesday, and I wish my parents had been around to see it.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 