Notes on the Inauguration of President Barack H. Obama from the National Mall

President-elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office from Chief Justice John Roberts to become the 44th

President of the United States on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Les Payne

January 25, 2009

The 12th Street crowd I waded into on Inauguration Day was as joyous as a 21-degree chill allows at 7:15 in the morning. Within two hours our phalanx of every stripe and hue, omni-Americans as Albert Murray might say, choked back three blocks to H Street.

Maneuvering around a water main break, our huddled masses without tickets inched determinedly along the side streets of the Capital. At 10:30 a.m., we dog-legged up a hill past a tight column of blue, port-a-potty toilets and onto the western end of the National Mall, nearly two miles from the spot where the President-elect would swear his oath on the Abraham Lincoln Bible.

Decades earlier, I had tarried on these exact grounds between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The descendants of slaves were petitioning for their rights from a descendant of indentured servants--the nation’s first Irish Catholic President. I had come down on the train from Hartford as a student to bear witness for the expansion of “democracy” in this vainglorious republic.  

The ’63 March got into the books on the strength of the “I Have a Dream” speech by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The following year, in a BBC interview, the civil rights leader predicted that the nation would elect a Negro president by 1988. One of his lieutenants took a stab at the long odds, raising $17 million and taking 1,250 delegates to the ’88 Democratic National Convention. Instead of Jesse Jackson, however, the Democrats nominated a smirking, second generation Greek, one Michael Dukakis, who promptly disappeared in his own time.

Overshooting King’s prediction by some 20 years, the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama unfolded last Tuesday as the fulfillment of a portion of the civil rights leader’s multifaceted “dream.” Give us the vote, he said, and we will change America.

I made the historic rounds at the National Mall this time with two teenagers from solid Washington D.C. families. How better to gauge this vaunted changing of the guard?

Unmindful of his ruling-class roots, Paul Phelps, 15, is the great-grandson of the 43rd governor of New York State. Nathan Lewis Miller swept into office with the landslide of President Warren G Harding, in 1920. In that quite different America, Gov. Miller, a former Justice of the New York State Supreme Court, had opposed women suffrage as a Republican of his time. Last November, his great grandson, an enthusiastic Obama supporter, went door-to-door to help get out the voters on Election Day, in Virginia.

"I wanted to be a part of the historical event and tell my children and grandchildren I was there,” said young Paul. As he and his friend huddled with me throughout the freezing hours before the Jumbo Tron, we took comfort in the mood of the light-hearted crowd. "It made me feel good,” said Paul, “it was amazing that complete strangers from all across the country could come together and all feel the same way...happy."

Keying the inauguration with “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” Aretha Franklin straightaway looped it back to the more tenebrous protest March by improvising to “let (freedom) ring from the red hills of Georgia” This sentiment was not that of anthem writer Samuel F. Smith but rather of Dr. King’s. Indeed, Franklin’s appearance marked a stylistic nexus with that of her mentor Mahalia Jackson, who, in a reminiscent headdress at the ’63 gathering on the National Mall sang the uplifting, “How I Got Over.”

Much has been made of Chief Justice John Roberts flubbing the rather straight-forward 39 words of the Presidential Oath of Office, a disruption that snapped the boys’ heads around. The Justice misplaced the adverb “faithfully, and misspoke “president of,” which brought on speculations that the conservative jurist held the former senator in contempt for having voted against Robert’s confirmation. Some suggest that his mistake reflected a deeper hesitancy in swearing in the nation’s first African American president.

I rather suspect that the live audience of 2 million, with another billion tuned in, simply rattled the rookie Chief Justice, who clearly didn’t yearn to go down in history as the man who flubbed the simple presidential oath.

As for Obama’s speech, the president put away the childishness of poetry for the earthbound governance of prose. Its appropriateness will play out, not in the balderdash of punditry, but in the unfolding of events in the coming days and years. Besides, with George W. Bush over his shoulder and Dick Chaney in his wheelchair nearby, I suspect the new President felt too freighted down with disasters for soaring rhetoric. The send-off of this duo called for an indictment in stiff prose—with the possibility of handcuffs, if not water-boarding.

Milling off the National Mall to the poetry of Elizabeth Alexander, young Paul recounted that his English teacher once taught this 46-year old Yale professor and author. The sophomore is also a schoolmate of President Obama’s daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, who attend Sidwell Friends, the elite private school in D.C. The Inaugural Poet is the daughter of Clifford Alexander, a former advisor to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was also the first black Secretary of the U.S. Army.

Alexander took his year old daughter Elizabeth to the ’63 March on Washington. When the ’55 “Rosa Parks bus,” where the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement refused to give up her seat to a white man, rolled in the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, both Alexander and his daughter must have been touched with pride.

Dr. King probably smiled down also.