Harlem celebrates dawning of the age of Obama

Harlem cheered, danced and shed a few tears under the sparkling lights of the New York skyline as the news came in that America really had elected its first black president.

As the polls closed, the crowd gathered below a giant television screen hoisted in the heart of black America's historic cultural capital on the corner of 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard.

They stayed late into the night as cable news called state after state for Barack Obama - Pennsylvania, Ohio, their own New York State, Florida - culminating in a victory that changed everything.

The legendary red neon sign of the Apollo Theatre glowed in the background, a fast food truck parked at the curb selling greasy White Castle hamburgers, and media crews drew up in taxis, talking in strange languages from around the world.

There was a sense that tomorrow really might be a brand new day in a country whose troubles none know better that those who live on the streets of Harlem, descendants of slavery, and that somehow it might feel different now to be an American.

"There's a feeling in the air and it's a good feeling," shouted out Brian Johnson, a 32-year-old lawyer. "For the first time we feel invested, we feel part of the process, we don't feel like outsiders, we feel we might belong. The next generation of black kids, of all kids, really can believe that in America you can be anything you want to be."

Mildred Barker had dressed in her Sunday best and stopped by to say a prayer at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church before casting her vote in the school house on 139th Street.

She brushed aside a tear to say: "I'm 70 years old and after all I have seen I am so glad this has happened, and that I have lived to see it."

Voters who would have slept through the polls in cynicism and contempt had queued around the block at dawn to vote for Obama. Record numbers of the black and the young turned out.

And it was the prospect of a black family living in the White House that was as much a draw as anything Obama himself had promised. "We want Obama, sure we do," explained Betty Cates, 68.

"But as for what it will mean to America, we'll have to wait and see. What I can tell you now is that to me it is a dream to know that come January, I will see two little black girls living there, in the White House."

The euphoria was real enough. But so was the sense of limitation, of reality. Black America has been conscious all through the campaign that the new President-elect is a black man in a different way.

With a Kenyan father and a white mother, they see him less as a man rooted in their historic experience as a mixed-race American representing the future.

William Tatum, the publisher and editor of Harlem's fiery black newspaper, The Amsterdam News, insists that the new president must be judged by his performance in office.

"As someone who marched with Martin Luther King, I can say I am certainly personally pleased," he said. "This day has come - the day Martin called for when a man was judged by the content of his character rather than the colour of his skin.

"But we should all remember this: while there is an Africa which is being treated the way it is treated by the world, it does not matter a damn how many black men are elected president of the United States."