Exactly 45 years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered an address that promoted the change of a nation on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Senator Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Presidential nomination, making him the first black man from a major political party to run for the President of the United States. This moment, too, will go down in history.

In a nation that segregated blacks and whites not even 50 years ago and once abided by Jim Crow laws, a black man could now take the highest political office in the United States; serving as proof of our nation’s progress through the years.

The son of a black Kenyan man and a white woman from Kansas, Obama breaks the mold of the conventional presidential candidate. Obama carries the torch of hundreds of blacks who have marched, fought and died for basic freedoms and just treatment, and has spoken openly about the “complexities of race in this country” as well as his hopes of unifying all races. “...I have asserted a firm conviction...rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people — that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union,” Obama said in his March address, “A More Perfect Union,” in Philadelphia, Penn.

As a black woman who carries the blood of black slaves and civil rights activists, I can relate to Barack Obama; a man who was not raised in a wealthy prominent household, but educated himself to advance and make a positive contribution to the nation in which he lives. Although several racial barriers have been broken in our country, Obama has faced his share of racial tension during his campaign — evidence that racism, a prejudice that I, too, have witnessed and experienced personally, still exists.

Regardless of who we support or what political party we belong to, Barack Obama’s candidacy for the President of the United States is a milestone for black people throughout this nation. I have read history books, heard the stories of my grandparents and their parents and wept from imagining the struggles they had to endure and overcome to gain equality. My race’s past makes me proud and grateful to witness this moment in the United States as well as optimistic that we can move beyond all of our racial wounds on the path to a more perfect union.