I know why Jesse Jackson, Colin Powell, and Oprah shed tears when Barack Obama won on Tuesday, said Mary Mitchell in the Chicago Sun-Times. It's still hard to believe it—a black man is moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As that reality hit me, I cried, too, "because the dream had been unfilled for so long, it no longer seemed to matter."
"A new era began with the election of America's first black president," said Joan Vennochi in The Boston Globe. The tears in the eyes of Jackson—who witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.—served as "a reminder that Obama's victory closes a curtain on the old civil rights movement."
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