This could let new black generation reach for the top

Barack Obama's ascension to the White House represents a major evolution in the history of American democracy. More specifically, Obama's victory constitutes the latest and perhaps most dramatic step in the long struggle by blacks to transform America.

His election helps bring the United States a step closer to reconciling the paradox of its existence as a nation founded on democratic principles yet forged in slavery.

For black Americans, Obama's victory resonates in special ways. While some commentators have suggested Obama's presence signals the end of black politics, I would argue that instead it better illustrates the evolution of the African-American struggle for civil and human rights over the past half century.

The civil rights movement's heroic period, from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Sixties, forcefully confronted America's apartheid system of "Jim Crow" laws and the associated poverty, police brutality, and segregation.

Between 1954's key Brown Supreme Court decision [against segregated schooling] and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, blacks, with their white allies, waged a far-reaching crusade against America's system of institutional racism.

By the mid-Sixties, the call for black power illustrated African-Americans' efforts to make self-determination and cultural and racial pride the hallmarks of a new black politics.

Voting rights secured by civil rights demonstrations became a weapon in the arsenal of black power activists organising new urban political machines to control major American cities such as Newark, Atlanta, and Detroit. Black elected officials during the Seventies and Eighties, with few exceptions, found their candidacies buoyed by a politics of racial solidarity. And in many ways Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns paved the way for Obama's historic victory.

Obama's victory affects African-Americans in at least three significant ways. First, it transforms the very aesthetic of the nation's democracy. This transformation goes beyond symbolism. Like a surrealist painter, Obama has successfully willed into being a world that could once only be imagined.

The iconography of the Obama administration over the next four years will reverberate throughout all levels of the black community, instilling a sense of pride and optimism while inspiring a new generation.

Second, an Obama presidency forces black activists to maintain a new level of vigilance. As America's first black president, Obama will be under tremendous pressure not to show any kind of racial favouritism in public policy.

Today's civil rights activists must keep up the pressure to ensure that struggles for racial and economic justice no longer remain on the fringes of the political debate.

Finally, the ultimate impact of Obama's presidency on the black community will be measured by government policy.

With national fatigue over affirmative action, Obama's willingness to propose bold and universal programmes to promote jobs, good schools, affordable healthcare and safe neighbourhoods will have the most concrete and beneficial effect on black America.

If Obama's election illustrates the tremendous strides in racial progress made in the US since the Sixties, America's high rates of black poverty, unemployment and imprisonment attest to the long journey that lies ahead.

Thus ultimately, the most immediate effects of the nation's first black president on African-Americans may be in allowing a new generation of young people to realise their enormous potential by imagining a world where their dreams actually can come true - and the possibilities for advancement are unlimited.

* Peniel Joseph is an associate professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.