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Obama victory sets off jubilation

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-11-05 14:13

As the news of a projected Obama victory flashed across the screen, men pumped their fists and bowed the heads. Women wept as they embraced their children, and many in the crowd high-fived and raised their arms skyward.

US President-elect Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) arrives to speak to supporters with his wife Michelle (R) and their children Malia (2nd R) and Sasha during his election night rally after being declared the winner of the 2008 US Presidential Campaign in Chicago, November 4, 2008. [Agencies]

Screams of "Thank you, Lord" were heard throughout the sanctuary as the Rev. Al Sharpton took the stage with his arms raised in victory.

"At this hour, many of us never, ever, even until the last days, felt that we would ever see this," he told the cheering crowd. "We are grateful to those who paid the price."

The audience joined hands as the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer led a prayer for the president-elect before singing "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," which is regarded as the black national anthem.

"Sisters and brothers, it looks like we have moved from Bloody Sunday to Triumphant Tuesday," Warnock said, referring to the Alabama march led by Lewis that was violently suppressed but sparked support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. "It's morning in America."

Martin Luther King III told the crowd that history was being made.

"Our father used to say that a voteless people is a powerless people," he said. "Something different happened in this election cycle."

Between speakers, the audience watched TV on large screens at the front of the sanctuary and clapped and sang hymns with the choir. Surveying the scene, Mattie Bridgewater whispered quietly from her seat, "I just can't believe it. Not in my lifetime."

Bridgewater said she went to the same elementary school as Emmett Till, the boy from Chicago whose murder in Mississippi was one of the catalysts of the civil rights movement. Both she and her 92-year-old mother, who still lives in Chicago, voted for Obama.

"I'm sitting here in awe," she said. "This is a moment in history that I just thank my God I was allowed to live long enough to see. Now, when I tell my students they can be anything they want to be, that includes president of the United States."

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