WASHINGTON -- As trumpets played and drums rolled, Barack Obama walked smiling out of the Capitol and into the winter sun to take his oath of office, stopping to embrace an icon of the civil rights movement, Rep. John Lewis, and another icon's son, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.
Jackson's father, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, looked down from the west front of the Capitol to the people below, and he thought of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington.
Before Obama stood a sea of humanity, almost too many to count, definitely too many to see, stretched out from the Capitol beyond the Washington Monument.
The Mall had plenty of open areas. But people huddled around the giant TVs transmitting pictures of the ceremony.
Sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Sonny Wells, 65, of Louisville could barely see the screen.
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"I don't need to see it. I can hear it. I can feel the good feeling of being here," said Wells, an African-American. "We got someone in our corner for a change."
Seated nearby, Myrna Mitchell, an African-American from New York, said: "It's the greatest experience I think I'm going to experience in life."
Standing in a blocks-long line awaiting entrance to the West Lawn, Bill Baarsma, 66, the Democratic mayor of Tacoma, Wash., noted the symmetry of the two inaugurations he has attended.
Spectators on the west front of the Capitol tried to stay warm in temperatures lingering in the 20s as they waited for the ceremonies to begin. Phyllis Ligon, 45, of Brooklyn, N.Y., came prepared. She crinkled in a silvery Mylar space blanket.
"I am warm, physically and spiritually," said the city education department worker, her head covered with a red-white-and-blue fleece hat, as she sat just below the spot where Obama would take the oath of office. "It's time for a change. It's a beautiful day."
Overall, the cold and the wind could not tamp down people's spirits.
"It's amazing, mind-blowing," said 18-year-old Jake Winkelman, an Austin, Texas, high school student. "As naive as it sounds, everything just changed."
"He's our first -- our first everything," said Jane Tillman, a 45-year-old African-American secretary from Easton, Md.
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© 2009, Chicago Tribune.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
