In the blur of people listening to Barack Obama's victory speech, their faces stood out. Jesse Jackson -- who had been with Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, on that balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, the evening he was assassinated -- and Oprah Winfrey, the talk show diva, as they witnessed history with tears in their eyes.
There were countless others, Black and White, who just let those tears flow. A white boy from Cleveland, Ohio, left his office desk in Mumbai, to go to the washroom to wipe his tears. A woman in Illinois, said in between tears, that the President-elect belonged to her state, and the state of Abraham Lincoln, who signed the law freeing African Americans from slavery in 1863.
It was a moment where -- to borrow a term from a CNN commentator -- America was correcting itself. It finally had elected an African American President and fulfilled the dream of that great visionary-poet from Atlanta.
Image: Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, and his wife Coretta Scott King's graves in Atlanta. Text and photographs: Archana Masih
Also read: America, we have come so far'
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