Afp, Chicago
US citizen and Kisumu residents take to the streets on Wednesday as they celebrate the victory of US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in the Nov 4 election. Obama's friends and relatives celebrated his victory with song and dance in the Kenyan family homestead of Kogelo, urging the nation's new hero to change the world and remember Kenya in the process. Photo: AFP
Ron Hilson stood alone as the streets of Chicago filled with people celebrating the election of the first black president of the United States.
People around him spoke of how Barack Obama has achieved the dream of racial equality that civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. described on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington some 45 years ago.
The country has changed, they said. Anything is possible now.
Hilson was hopeful they were right. But he'd been hopeful before. And he'd seen that hope die in 1968 when King was assassinated.
He saw drug addiction rip families and communities apart. He saw gangs turn neighbourhoods into war zones. He saw schools in inner city neighbourhoods crumble with neglect after whites fled to the suburbs.
Hilson blames the violence, crime and social problems which plague the black community on the despair which set in after the civil rights movement failed to deliver equal opportunity alongside equal rights.
While the income gap has been slowly narrowing over the past 40 years, the poverty rate for blacks is still three times that of whites and blacks are twice as likely to be unemployed as whites.
Blacks are six times more likely to be murdered than whites and seven times more likely to end up in jail.
If racial equality is to be achieved this time around, the black community will have to hold onto the hope and optimism, which erupted Tuesday night, Hilson said.
"I hope this carries on past tonight, past tomorrow, past next week," Hilson told AFP.
"If the young people would look at this as an opportunity to grow and change their ways that would help this country incredibly. Because we all need to pitch in."
Obama acknowledged that there is plenty of work ahead as he celebrated his victory in Grant Park, the site of violent clashes during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
"This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change," Obama told a crowd of 240,000 supporters.
"And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you."
Repairing the social damage wrought by slavery and segregation is the responsibility of the black community, said Conrad Worrill, the co-founder of the National Black United Front and a professor at Northeastern Illinois University.
Obama's election was "a historic moment in breaking down racial barriers in the United States" but it remains to be seen if "this moment in history inspires us to significantly change our behaviour and the way we treat each other," Worrill said in an interview Wednesday.
But while there is a need for people to step up and change their lives and their communities, significant structural problems must also be addressed, said Mark Sawyer, the director of the Centre for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).