Obama Inaugurated: America's First Black President

Nearly two million people stood in freezing temperatures on the National Mall on January 20, 2009, to watch Barack Hussein Obama take the oath of office as the 44th President of the United States. He was forty-seven years old, the son of a Kenyan father and a Kansas mother, and his inauguration as the first African American president came 143 years after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and forty-five years after the Civil Rights Act. Obama's path to the presidency ran through one of the most improbable campaigns in American political history. A first-term senator from Illinois with less than four years of national experience, he defeated Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic frontrunner, in a bruising primary contest, then won the general election against Senator John McCain by a decisive margin of 365 to 173 electoral votes. His campaign raised more than $750 million, much of it through small online donations that rewrote the rules of political fundraising. The inauguration ceremony was laden with historical symbolism. Obama took the oath on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln had used at his first inauguration in 1861. The Capitol building where he was sworn in had been constructed in part by enslaved laborers. The Reverend Joseph Lowery, a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference alongside Martin Luther King Jr., delivered the benediction. Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath, stumbling over the prescribed words, and Obama paused to let him correct himself before completing the recitation. The minor flub led to a private re-administration of the oath the following day in the Map Room of the White House, out of an abundance of constitutional caution. Obama's inaugural address was measured rather than triumphant, acknowledging the severity of the crises he inherited: two wars, a financial system in freefall, and an economy losing 800,000 jobs per month. "That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood," he said. "Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened." The crowd stretched from the Capitol steps to the Lincoln Memorial, the largest gathering in the history of the National Mall. For millions of Americans, the inauguration represented an achievement they had been told would not happen in their lifetimes.