[Portions of this blog appeared on Huffington Post and the African American Studies Center of Oxford University Press and are published here with permission of OUP.]

Very few presidential elections change America. The elections of 1800, 1828, 1860, and 1932 come to mind as the most obvious examples of elections that truly transformed the nation. They put four important presidents into office—Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. They also altered the shape of politics for a generation. Important, but not as transformative, were the victories of McKinley (1896), Kennedy (1960), and Reagan (1980). These elections did not fundamentally alter politics, and they were not as long lasting in their impact. Kennedy’s was important mostly because his election finally broke the religious barrier that prevented Catholics from reaching the White House.

To this list of important elections, we can now add 2008.

With the election of Barack Obama, America is forever changed. The change is not about politics in the normal sense. The Democrats solidified their control of Congress, but that is not earthshaking. The “in party” is now the “out party” in the White House. That has happened before and will do so again. But the fact that Obama is African American is transformative. There is no other way to understand the stunning rise of Barack Obama. Four years ago he was virtually unknown. At the Democratic National Convention in 2004 he gave a spectacular speech, which put him on the national stage. That speech illustrated the power of rhetoric and the importance of both performance and substance in American politics. Four years later, against all odds, he was elected president.

When Obama was born in 1961, segregation was still legal in a third of the nation. The majority of blacks lived in the South, where few could vote; almost none went to integrated schools, and they were barred from public facilities, restaurants, hotels, theaters, amusement parks, public parks, and just about everywhere else. No black had ever served on the Supreme Court, in a president’s cabinet, or as the elected governor of a state. None had been in the Senate since Reconstruction.
The bloodiest battles of the civil rights movement had yet to be fought, and the civil rights martyrs of the decade—Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr., were still alive. So, too, were the three young men who would be murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi (Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney); Viola Liuzzo, a mother from Detroit, who would be murdered in Selma, Alabama; and the four young girls who would be blown up in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

The America that Barack Obama was born into was a deeply segregated place. His black father and white mother could not even have lived in the same house in 1961 in about eighteen states. Anyone predicting that the son of this union would one day be president would have risked being committed to a mental hospital. The idea of a black president was not just remote; it was impossible to conceive. Only in a science fiction story about an alternative universe could the parents of the baby Barack Obama have thought he would one day be president of the Harvard Law Review, a member of the U.S. Senate, and eventually the primary resident of the White House.

Welcome to the alternative universe of 2008.

Obama’s victory was in part a function of his ability to communicate his ideas. He also communicated a sense of hope for the nation and a vision of a future that would be better than the present. His buzz word was change, but his method was inspiration. Millions who had never been involved with politics gave money and time to support a new candidate—and to support a candidate who is black.

An Obama presidency will not end racism. It may, in fact, lead to some increase in overt racist talk, as those who don’t like his policies will blame them on race. But in other ways, an Obama presidency will change the nature of race relations. Whites who said they would never vote for a black man in the end did just that. The Republican Party, which played the race card so effectively with Willie Horton in 1988, was unable to do so this time. John McCain and his supporters offered up offensive and nasty racist characterizations of Obama, including distributing handbills that looked like food stamps with Obama on them. In a last desperate effort, the McCain campaign focused on Obama’s former preacher, the Reverend Wright. But a radical minister is no Willie Horton, and no one seemed to be much affected by the effort.

Even as he became the first black president, Obama transcended race. His earliest support did not come from the black community but instead from upper-middle-class Americans of all races, who were charmed by his intelligence and thoughtfulness and anxious to find a new political leader in the new century. Obama campaigned on economics, foreign policy, health care, and jobs. He rarely spoke of inequality or civil rights, not because he is not concerned about them but because he understood that they were not the central issues of the election. Furthermore, he understood that inequality in health care and job opportunity cannot be overcome until we all have health care and the economy is no longer in freefall. Thus, Obama campaigned on issues that affect all Americans, without regard to race, geography, or class.

Indeed, in the end, Obama is not America’s first black president—he is America’s first president who happens to be black. The difference is huge.

Paul Finkelman is the President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy and Senior Fellow, Government Law Center, at Albany Law School. He is the executive editor of the “Milestone Documents” series published by Schlager Group. A specialist in American legal history, race, and the law, Finkelman is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and more than twenty books.