Just a few times in my life I’ve been aware of history being made. I’ve lived through a lot of history in my nearly sixty years, but it isn’t often that I’ve known, at the time it was happening, that the world was changing. I remember when I learned of the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. I watched the Apollo 11 crew land on the moon and the Twin Towers fall. And there’s one great moment I even participated in: the election of Barack Obama.

Today we celebrate the birthday of Dr. King and look forward to the inauguration tomorrow of the first black president in our history. The two events are not just divided by one day, but by the course of history over the last forty years, and the last 300 years. Some of the shadows that have haunted us, some of the dark corners where Dr. King tried to shine his light, are now, at this moment, a little less forbidding.

It’s a wonderful thing to live in a multiracial, multicultural society, with rich traditions that come from so many different sources. It makes us a better people. It feels right now as if we’re crossing a bridge into a world where more things possible than we could have dreamed when I was growing up, back in the sixties. (And we did some pretty elaborate dreaming back then.)

I never ever doubted that an African American could serve as president, but I couldn’t have expected it to happen in my lifetime. People half my age might not see the magnitude of this moment in exactly the same way I do. In fact, I know they don’t, because I’ve talked with them about it. They know what it means, but they feel it differently. They accept, in a way that I could have until it happened, that this country is at a place where the color of a person’s skin is not a deciding factor in whether that person can be elected president.

And that’s the way it should be. It should be routine and irrelevant. We didn’t elect Barack Obama for the color of his skin, but for the content of his character. I don’t know what kind of president he’s going to be, but I see a man with a clear head and an open heart who will always try to do the right thing. The challenges may turn out to be bigger than the man, but he has already shown that he will be president of all the people, in a way we’ve never seen before. That, as much as the historic first of America electing a black president, is why tomorrow will be such a watershed day, and why I will always remember it that way.