Monday, January 19, 2009

Living history

It is one of the those moments that comes along once in a lifetime.

Ironically, over the weekend, and in the next two days, we will be presented with several of them.

The first came on Saturday. On an almost indescribably cold day, people waited outside for hours in places like Chester, Claymont and Wilmington.

Some of them shivered for hours in single-digit temperatures because they wanted to see history with their own eyes.

Others simply had to be there to see something they thought they would never see in their lifetime.

Barack Obama, an African American, boarded a train in Philly and then rolled through Delaware County on his way to Washington, D.C., to be installed as the 44th president of the United States.

The train did not slow down as it rolled through Chester. It did not make the occasion any less special.

Elaine Corbin was among those frozen believers in Chester. She sounded a familiar theme.

“I never thought I’d see a black president,” Corbin said. “Martin Luther King, he had a dream, and this is is dream.”

The Rev. Ronald Hughes of Community Baptist Church also was among the throng in Chester. He had his 12 year-old son and 14-year-old nephew in tow.

“It’s history in the making, and I wanted my son to be a part of history,” Hughes said.

I think back to the front page of the newspaper we created for the morning after the election last November. It was dominated by a single word: History.

Today you might call it living history.

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