On the November night that the United States elected Barack Obama as its new President, NBC News anchorman Brian Williams called it “a seismic shift in American politics.” Yes, it is. Yet seismic shifts are, ultimately, created by many forces and actions that culminate in a particular moment. This seemed particularly poignant while walking along the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on Saturday and Sunday and exploring the nation’s capital.

Washington, D.C. has felt electric in the days leading up to the January 20 inauguration of Obama as President and Joe Biden as Vice-President of the United States. Dozens of major events are happening on Inauguration Day, from the Inaugural Parade to the balls, and many of them are sure to be festive, moving, and full of pageantry.

But during these several days many people looked happy just to come down to the National Mall in Washington and view the flag-draped U.S. Capitol, the grounds, and the stage where our 44^th President will take the oath of office. They were, like me, drinking in the atmosphere and relishing this time of gathering together. Joy was in the air as sure as the tingly cold January weather. If you needed a gauge of it, you could see it in the smiling faces all around.

We saw hundreds of people who walked up as close as they could get to the Capitol area where the swearing-in ceremony is taking place or around the National Mall, gazed toward the stage, and took pictures of the scene. It was as if we each wanted our own freeze-frame of this historic moment. People chatted with each other, asking where the other was from. African-Americans were numerous among the crowd.

We as a people are crossing a threshold. Today we will see the first African-American President in the history of the U.S. take office. Isn’t this at least one signpost of the Promised Land that Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about? Many will also welcome the end of the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, such a dark, dismal, and infamous chapter in history. Many Americans are savoring this change, like travelers who are tired and beaten up after the long, rough journey of the Bush-Cheney years suddenly seeing a vista from a mountain perch.

Divisions are still there, but on this day a strong sense of a common purpose joins us. Where better could one participate in this moment and reflect on it than the National Mall, where hundreds of thousands will attend the Inauguration? It’s a place where so many have expressed their hopes and desires over the years in protests and other gatherings, and it holds those memories.

As I walked at the National Mall with family members over the past weekend, I looked around and thought of the steps – some trying, painful, or tragic, some joyous and victorious – that got us here. I considered the headlines I had seen during one afternoon at Washington’s Newseum, in the gallery that depicts the history of news. I almost felt chills as I saw the 1860 broadside, the Charleston Mercury Extra, with its headline announcing “The Union Is Dissolved!” just after South Carolina seceded. I read the front page of one of the newspapers that in 1863 printed the entire Emancipation Proclamation, in which President Abraham Lincoln declared that all slaves held in the rebel states shall be set free. From August 1920 was a newspaper front page proclaiming that women finally had won suffrage. Yes, these are some of the steps on the way to Jan. 20, 2009.

King’s Dream Ever Alive

We can read our history in the buildings on the Mall. Slaves helped to build the Capitol. I looked at the statue atop it, the female “Statue of Freedom,” and thought of how in the 1850s then-Secretary of War Jefferson Davis – who would within a few years lead the Confederacy – objected to plans for the statue to have a liberty cap, a symbol of freed slaves, on top. Because of Davis’ objections, sculptor Thomas Crawford replaced the cap with a Roman helmet with eagle feathers.

Beyond the Mall to the west stands the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech to more than 250,000 people on Aug. 28, 1963. There, King told of dreaming of the time when this nation would “live out the true meaning of its creed,” a day when his four children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The hundreds of thousands hung on to his words and his dream as they listened and shouted praise from around the reflecting pool. Seeing this place in 2009, one thinks of those people and the leader who gave his life for that cause.

Today, just over 45 years later, we as a nation have walked the steps to cross over one threshold of King’s dream. Speaking on Monday during the holiday that honors King, incoming President Obama said, “Tomorrow, we will come together as one people on the same Mall where Dr. King’s dream echoes still.”

The power of that dream and the sounds of the footsteps of those who have come before, who have fought, protested, and sacrificed in order to expand the promise and freedom of the United States, call us as one people to mark the day on which Barack Obama becomes President. On Inauguration Day, 2009, the National Mall in Washington is a place for ordinary citizens to celebrate this historic moment and to be mindful of the meaning of freedom, to see in the election of this man from Chicago the realization of some dreams and the calling forth for Americans to work together on others that remain.