January 12, 2009 Civil rights journey that led to Obama's inauguration Play video

(Greg Wayland, NECN) - In eight days, Barack Obama will become the nation's 44th president.

Millions of Americans, whether or not they voted for Obama, recognize this as a milestone in a long, often tragic journey to freedom and equality for the nation's African Americans.

For Americans of a certain age, it seems like just yesterday-- the birth of that movement whose anthem and whose promise was "we shall overcome." and whose leader dreamed great dreams.

“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream."

Suddenly it's Labor Day, 2007. First-term U.S. senator Barack Obama is campaigning for president alongside Mitt Romney in Milford, New Hampshire. He's a long shot and he knows it.

People know me in terms of my name but they get a sense that I sort of popped onto the scene two years ago.

Fifteen months later, this son of both black and white parents is about to become leader of the free world. And this is important, say Obama’s African American supporters, for many reasons.

Stith: The most obvious of which is the extent to which it completes the promise that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.

Charles Stith is director of Boston University's African presidential archives and research center and former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania.

And the fact that the

promise of America started with the enslavement of African-Americans and now we celebrate the election of an African-American as President. It completes the American promise.

That promise been broken often. A stubborn prejudice has persisted in American life. It's not hard to find examples.

In 1941, the Boston College Eagles traveled to the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans and beat Tennessee for its only national college football championship. But there was somebody missing for B.C. -- somebody who wasn't even allowed to practice with his team.

He was B.C.'s star running back, African American Lou Montgomery -- banned from the playing field in the segregated south.

Just one of multitudes of indignities, before Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of that Alabama bus. Before the threats insults, bombings and murders mounted as the civil rights movement grew.

Before that april night in 1968 when the leader of this movement seemed to have a prophet's vision.

“Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I've seen the promise land.”

The next day an assassin's bullet ended dr. Martin Luther King’s journey as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis. Violence, white recrimination and division were poisoning a peaceful movement.

Riots followed Dr. King's death.

And there had already been riots in L.A., Detroit and Newark. And more radical voices had begun to carry the day. Malcom X: Not only that we're as good as the white man, but better than the white man.

But all that was yesterday. Today Barack Obama’s triumph in a racially integrated America has brought joy to many quarters.

No place more than Harvard Law School where Obama was a student and where Professor Charles Ogletree was among his teachers.

Ogletree: And I was so certain that this was going to be America's greatest mayor, never thought he would go on to the great heights he's reached.

Great heights, says Ogletree, but not -- in his estimate -- the promised land Dr. King envisioned. Just another opportunity to talk about race in America.

What Barack Obama has said and what we all have to say is we haven't solved the race problem. We're not beyond race. We're not in a post racial era.

So he will start the conversation, but it's really going to take place in cafeterias and barbershops, in churches and classrooms and offices around America.