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Daniel Acker / Bloomberg News

Democratic president-elect Barack Obama waves to supporters following his acceptance speech during an election night rally in Grant Park in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008. Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, opening a new chapter in the country’s history as the first African-American to hold the world’s most important job.

Nearly 4 1/2 years ago, Barack Obama introduced himself to America by painting a picture of a country that was united, somehow, in spite of itself. The pundits, he said in the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, like to “slice and dice” the country: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. “But I’ve got news for them too: We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states, and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.” His task that night in Boston was to ready the crowd for the presidential nominee, John F. Kerry, but in the end his words were most memorable for an argument that challenged the partisan divide and was built on the foundation of his own unique story.

His father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas. But it’s more complicated than that.

Abandoned by his father, separated for long periods from his mother, Obama searched for many years to find his identity. He eventually learned to navigate between black and white worlds. He earned a reputation as a pragmatist and a consensus builder, and along the way raised the bridges that would sustain his ambition.

Race has been the steady undertow of his political career — and of his life.

As he paraphrased William Faulkner in March in a landmark speech on race: “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.”

Early years

Interracial relationships in Hawaii are an accepted fact of life. Nevertheless, the parents of Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Hussein Obama didn’t like the idea of their children getting married. She was studying anthropology at the University of Hawaii. He was a graduate student from Kenya, the first African enrolled at the university.

They married in late 1960, and on Aug. 4, 1961, Barack Jr. was born. Two years after that, his father left to study economics at Harvard.

The separation led to divorce. Ann married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student at the university. In 1967, she and her 6-year-old son, whom she called Barry, followed Soetoro to Jakarta, a strange and wonderful place of kite-flying and crocodiles, exotic foods and strange religions.

But the adventure had a darker side. The poverty was inescapable. Ann and Lolo drifted apart. She took a job teaching English at the U.S. Embassy, and it was here in the library, Obama said, that he read about a black man who had tried to peel off his skin.

Although his mother tried to affirm his black heritage — bringing home books about the civil rights movement, speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. — Barry was learning the price people pay for being different.

When he was 10, his mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents and attend the prestigious Punahou School. On an island where there were few blacks, he watched “I Spy” on television, tried to sing like Marvin Gaye and cursed like Richard Pryor. He stayed out late, shooting hoops, and started to drink and smoke weed, he said, just to “push questions of who I was out of my mind.”

On the mainland, the reality of race was more stark.

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Barack Obama: In search of identity – Los Angeles Times.

NEWSWEEK asked descendants of key figures in civil rights history to write letters to their ancestors describing their thoughts and feelings about the historic inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States. And to add to the record, we’ve collected letters from students and notable figures to Obama, and discussed the power of words with will.i.am and the inaugural poet.

Newsweek Video | Beyond Words: Two Heirs to Two Great Americans.

BERGEN-BELSEN, Germany — Habbo Knoch, who runs the new Bergen-Belsen Memorial at the former concentration camp, invited various scholars and museum directors to a four-day conference here last week called “Witnessing: Sites of Destruction and the Representation of the Holocaust.” He asked a question one evening during a break: “Will people in 20 years look back and say we built a museum that focuses on Nazi genocide while Darfur was happening? Will they ask whether anyone raised this issue?”

Consider it raised.

The new memorial is an immense concrete and glass museum emerging from a copse of trees beside the cemetery of mass graves (there are more than 70,000 bodies buried there), which had been the camp site. The permanent exhibition is a model of its kind, focused on the meticulous and sober reconstruction of the past. From time to time the present literally intrudes with a bang, though, when practice rounds of tank fire from the British military base next door boom over the treetops.

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Abroad – The Bergen-Belsen Memorial Museum Views the Holocaust Not From Then but From the Here and Now – NYTimes.com.

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) — Barack Obama’s inauguration marks a profound manifestation of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s dream, civil rights leaders say, but the movement would be foolish to drop its guard now.

Christine King Farris sits next to a photo of her brother as she reads to kids to commemorate his birthday Thursday.

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King did not fight tirelessly and ultimately give his life so African-Americans could take office; he fought for the disenfranchised and downtrodden, no matter their color, said Charles Steele, president and CEO of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King and Steele’s father helped found.

“President-elect Barack Obama is just a piece of the puzzle,” he said. “This tells us that we are at a station, but it’s not our destination. We’ve got to get back on the train.”

Steele said he worries that those who espouse King’s dream may grow lackadaisical because an African-American has taken the reins of the free world. But it is imperative, he said, that they “march now more than ever before.”

Steele points to 1963, when tens of thousands of protesters converged on Washington to demand equal rights. It was there King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech from the Lincoln Memorial steps.

President Kennedy’s administration was considered the most receptive ever to the concerns of the civil rights movement, Steele said. But rather than sit back and hope Kennedy did the right thing, King and thousands stormed Washington to lay out demands that later would yield the Civil Rights Act and National Voting Rights Act.

Those down for the cause today must do the same with Obama, Steele said.

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Civil rights vets: Fight not over because Obama reaches top – CNN.com.