ABSTRACT
Our election of Barack Obama is the singular culmination of several great trajectories in American history, beginning with the introduction of slavery to the Americas and continuing through the great fight up from slavery to the very day we elected a black man president. A long sector of that arc was determined by the contradictory acts of the men who wrote a constitution and a bill of rights that endorsed slavery and freedom at the same time. The election of Barack Obama is not an incremental step away from the heritage of slavery; it is a social revolution.
