It will be a very long time indeed before the euphoria surrounding the elevation of an African American to the most powerful position on the planet subsides. And, whether his presidency meets with success (and who is there among us that would not wish him success?), it has to be acknowledged that his inauguration in January will be a momentous occasion.

Across the broad sweep of history, mankind has witnessed unforgettable moments. The chapter relating to the achievements of Barack Obama will not easily be erased. We therefore hope and pray that his presidency will not come to be tainted by any activity that will tarnish the trust that has come to be reposed in him.

As has been said over and over again, President-elect Obama is an inspirational figure. He is capable of following in the line of great leaders such as Hannibal of a bygone age and Nelson Mandela of the present era.

I confess that, like so many others, this was a day that I never expected to witness. Robert Kennedy was a person of exceptional qualities, but no one regarded him as a prophet. It is well recorded that, in the late 1960s, he had predicted that within 40 years, the United States would have a black president. Like so many others, I applauded the sentiment, but consigned it to the notion of wishful thinking.

During the last half century, this is the third phenomenal occurrence that has threatened to take mankind out of himself. My maternal grandmother went to her grave refusing to believe and accept that man had landed on the Moon in the 1960s.

A giant step

Of course, at that time, there was no television or live satellite streaming into the heart of Clarendon where my aged grandmother resided. She, therefore, maintained that these revelations that were being made by the younger ones around her were mere myths of the same character as cows jumping over the Moon, as she had learnt at school in nursery rhymes.

But man did land on the Moon and "a giant step" was taken for mankind. Several positive happenings have followed in the taking of that giant step, but most of us would candidly say that we had to see it to believe it.

In the winter of the decade of the 1980s, a vision of Nelson Mandela leaving his prison cell to become the president of South Africa was mind-boggling even to contemplate. The repressive apartheid regime, though abhorred in several quarters, had its fair share of powerful support. It is true that the regime was becoming increasingly isolated, but to contemplate that kind of quick transformation was to dream dreams.

But it soon came to pass and Mandela did leave his cell at Roben Island, triumphantly, to become not only the president of South Africa, hard on the heels of the apartheid regime, but also to become the iconic figure and the conscience of the age. Again, we had to see it to believe it.

Wealthy heiress

Martha 'Sunny' Crawford von Bulow, an extremely wealthy heiress, unfortunately slipped into an irreversible coma in December 1980, and died last weekend. If she had slipped out of her coma at the weekend, instead of dying, she would probably have come to accept, but with untold difficulty, that Mandela had in fact become the president of South Africa. And, It would certainly have taken a mountain of convincing for her to come to terms with the fact that an African American was about to ascend to the most powerful position on Earth and was now president-elect of the United States of America.

For, in December 1980, when Ronald Reagan was president-elect, Sunny von Bulow must have seen Robert Kennedy's prophecy as mere fantasy. She would have had to see it to believe it.

Some people say that, difficult as it was to imagine an African American male president, the question of a black first lady was something that passed all understanding or imagination. And, as to black children frolicking on the south lawn, some would say: 'tell me some more fairy tales'.

We, thankfully, have not seen anything in her make up to suggest that First Lady-to-be Michelle Obama will be less than a beacon to women everywhere, and, in particular, to women in the developing world.

Of course, lest we ignore the fact, to the young generation, these kinds of occurrences are by no means as strange as they are for those of older generations. The question is whether the importance of these happenings is not lost on the younger generation who were not exposed to the struggles, hopes and aspirations signalled, for example, by Marcus Mosiah Garvey in "up you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will".

Complete turnaround

So, the question must now be asked: how is it that those of the younger generation will come to know, in-depth, about the forerunners and their exploits and how these new occurrences have been made possible? They must be told the story of how the people of the United States has come to make a complete turnaround within 40 years.

When Robert Kennedy made his memorable prediction, only a couple of years had passed since African Americans had been brought fully into the electoral processes in the US. It is recorded, for example, that the National Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disfranchisement of African Americans in the United States.

Echoing the language of the 15th Amendment, the act prohibited states from imposing any "voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or colour". Specifically, Congress intended the act to outlaw the practice of requiring otherwise qualified voters to pass literacy tests in order to register to vote, a principal means by which southern states had prevented African-Americans from exercising the franchise.

This means that it is our duty to remind ourselves and those of the younger generation that, those rights which were gained by persons of African descent in the United States in 1965 had been enjoyed by such persons in Jamaica for over 20 years before that time.

More than an orator

Our youths should ponder as to why Obama never loses an opportunity to pay homage to such a personage as Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who established himself as one of the greatest orators in US history. Of course, King was more than an orator and Barack Obama would firmly assert that, if there had not been a Martin Luther King and several other contributors along the journey, there could not have been a President-elect Obama.

It is clear that Obama acknowledges King as an activist and prominent leader in the civil rights movement and whose main legacy was to secure substantial progress on civil rights in the United States.

The President-elect will soon be the leader in Washington, where King delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech, which raised public consciousness of the civil rights movement to an exponentially high level across the globe, causing him, one year later, to become the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end racial segregation and racial discrimination.

And so, the new president will continue to have the example and the inspiration of the African, the arch conciliator and consensus-builder of the age, Nelson Mandela, for strong guidance.

And he will have the vision and dream of the warrior for racial integration, the American, Martin Luther King Jr, to take that movement closer to the mountain top.

World challenges

The African American president-elect has already given strong signals that he is endowed with the qualities of those two leaders. We have witnessed how he deals with his political opponents, whether of his own party during the primaries or of the other parties during the presidential election, itself. No question of denigrating his fellow countryman or woman.

And, he has continued on that path in seeking to build his family of lieutenants to tackle the most awesome world challenges and crises in many a decade, with the United States in the middle.

The stream of consensus-building that President-elect Obama has sought to tap for his political journey is a stream from which leadership within Jamaica must drink, and, particularly so, in this time of real, not imagined, crisis.

This is not an easy road to contemplate, in the turmoil that passes for leadership in our country at this time. But, it is a road which has to be taken.

Clearly, success along that road cannot be built on name-calling, victimisation and denigrating of those who hold an opposite or different view. Success along that road will never be guaranteed in an atmosphere in which the head of government chooses, despite strong suggestions and warnings against adopting such a course, to dismiss, "for misbehaviour", persons who hold high public office and, when faced with a test of his actions in court, he proceeds to withdraw the allegation. Such actions leave avoidable stains.

That is the kind of route that has been eschewed by King and Mandela and which has not manifested itself in the make-up of the president-elect. That is, perhaps the first lesson to be learnt from the attitude and posture that he has brought to service and leadership.

A. J. Nicholson is Opposition spokesman on justice. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.