By Charlotte Hayward

Email me at c.hayward@my.westminster.ac.uk

To find out more about the issue of race within the American Election 2008 and its history click here.

Barack Hussein Obama has become the 44th President of America as of November 4th 2008.

Nearly two years of campaigning have led to a moment which brought tears to Jesse Jackson’s eyes. A campaign which was “not hatched in the halls of Washington” but in the “backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston” has resulted on the steps of Washington.

A man from a remote African village will now rule the free world on 20th January 2008.

It seems that Martin Luther King’s dream may have come true. With a black president in the highest office in the land, the doors of segregation are truly shut. Now, anyone can make it. “Yes, we can.”

Obama’s story is America’s story

In the year of Barack Obama’s birth, 1961, black people were born in segregated hospitals, educated in segregated school systems and buried in segregated graveyards.

Fifty years ago Rosa Parks refused to give up her sit on a bus, and forty years since Martin Luther King and others risked their lives in the march for civil rights and the right to vote.

Without them, there would be no Barack Obama.

Obama cited Ann Dixon Cooper in his victory speech. At aged 106 she remembers when women or black people were not allowed to vote.

Talking to the BBC she said, ‘I feel nothing but relief that things have changed as much as they have, so I can’t look for anything better right now…after a while we will be all one.’

A message which echoes Obama’s own ethos, ‘we have never just been a collection of red states and blue states. We are and always will be the United States of America.’

Maya Angelou, American author and poet said she was ’so proud’ of Obama’s victory and America. ‘Look at our hearts, look at our souls, we have elected a black man to speak for us…I am an American.’

Find out more! Click here.