From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

In calling President-elect Barack Obama a “house Negro,” Al Qaeda missed the memo from Grant Park. Before Obama’s victory speech in Chicago, the crowd of 125,000 people said the Pledge of Allegiance. In my 53 years I have never heard such a multicultural throng recite the pledge with such determined enunciation, expelling it from the heart in a treble soaring to the skies and a bass drumming through the soil to vibrate my feet. The treble and bass met in my spine, where “liberty and justice for all” evoked neither clank of chains nor cackle of cruelty, but a warm tickle of Jeffersonian slave-owning irony: Justice cannot sleep forever.

Spontaneous street bursts of the pledge and the national anthem came from notoriously liberal Madison, Wis., and the People’s Republic of Cambridge. The day after the election, children claimed they said the pledge in school like they never said it before, in places like majority-black Washington, which still does not have a vote in Congress, and Memphis, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Eleven days after the election, University of Washington political scientist Christopher Parker stood for the national anthem and the unfurling of the American flag before the Washington-UCLA football game in Seattle. Parker, an African-American, served in the Navy for 10 years.

“In the Navy we were conditioned to revere the flag, but knowing what it often stood for, it was a tortured feeling,” Parker said over the telephone. “I’ve often had a hard time saying the words. But as I watched the flag being unfurled, time kind of slowed down. I thought of the race speech (by Obama), the Democratic National Convention, and the crowd in Denver. I thought about him at Grant Park. I felt free to be proud, free not to be angry. I can actually say the words. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I guess it’s OK to be an American now.’ ”

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