For all the country's greatness and that oversized sense of certitude Americans tend to have about their own place in the world, there has remained a yawning gap in the evolution of the United States that has caused a sense of unease with itself.

Its constitution speaks grandly to the universality of the rights of the individual. The great strides of the last half a century notwithstanding, America wasn't quite sure what space to afford its black population in particular, and minorities in general. Nor has it, after nearly 90 years of the right of the woman to vote, embraced the equality of gender, especially on the political front, with the same intensity of other major democracies.

Closing the gap

This past week, though, America has formally gone a long way towards closing that gap and finally delivering on the society envisioned by its founding fathers, but to which even they were not willing to commit fully.

At its convention in Denver, Colorado, on Thursday, America's Democratic Party officially made Barack Obama its nominee for election to the US presidency in November. Mr Obama is what Americans call an African American, which is to say, he is a black man. He is of mixed race, the product of a white American mother and Kenyan father. He is married to a visibly black woman.

Significantly, Mr Obama's main contender for the nomination was Hillary Rodham Clinton, the wife of the former president, Bill Clinton, and the senator representing the state of New York.

History

So, either way, the Democratic Party would have made history. Its nominee for the presidency was either going to be a black man or a woman - a first for a major American party. In hard-fought primaries, Mr Obama was the narrow victor.

On Friday, John McCain, who will be Mr Obama's opponent in the election, named a woman, Sarah Palin, governor of the state of Alaska, as his running mate. This is the second time that a major party, following Geraldine Ferraro as Democrat Walter Mondale's running mate in 1984, will have a woman in the number-two slot of a presidential ticket.

The upshot: An African American will be president of the United States or a woman will be vice-president. These are not developments to be easily glossed over.

It was just 40 years ago that the civil-rights leader, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, was assassinated while campaigning for full expression of the right of black Americans to vote and to enjoy the other rights guaranteed by the American Constitution. Fifty years ago, apartheid, though not so called, was rampant in parts of the United States and the spectre of Jim Crow stalked the land.

Highly symbolic

It was highly symbolic that Mr Obama's speech accepting his nomination came on the 45th anniversary of Dr King's speech at the march on Washington, in which he dreamed of events unfolding, and hoped for an America in which a person would be judged by "the content or his character rather than the colour of his skin".

This week's developments don't indicate that racism and sexism do not remain strong in the United States, for they do. They are signs, though, that America is healing a part of its soul that has remained very raw.

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