With Sen. Barack Obama, we are witnesses to history.

Many blacks believed they would never live long enough to see such an occurrence.

After all, blacks were only fully enfranchised in 1965, after a vigorous civil-rights movement pushed the nation to pass the Voting Rights Act.

That history will resonant strongly at the Democratic convention on Aug. 28, as Obama accepts the party’s nomination on the 45th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream Speech.”

What’s more, his defeat of Sen. Hillary Clinton also may have been the biggest upset in the history of presidential primary politics.

She had all the advantages as a former first lady and senator from New York, with nearly 100 percent name recognition and a wide network of political contacts.

He was just up from the Illinois state legislature with a surname that rhymes with Osama and a middle name identical to that of the Iraqi dictator the United States had recently toppled.

Only four years ago, Senate candidate Obama had wowed the nation with an inspiring speech at the August 2004 Democratic Convention. The speech was most Americans’ first exposure to this self-professed “skinny guy with big ears, from the South Side of Chicago.”

With his Ivy League-honed intelligence, calm demeanor, youthful good looks and vaguely progressive politics, Obama struck a resonant chord. And although his campaign message is idealistic and inspirational, Obama also brought political skills gleaned from his rough-and-tumble battles in Chicago politics. Chief among those skills was organization, and he put together a top-notch staff of campaign-tested strategists and innovative fundraisers.

Obama’s political bandwagon had been rolling with little resistance until the comments of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright created a racial pothole. Until then, the biracial Obama had managed to steer clear of the issue of race. It is another measure of his political skills that he so far has managed to get past that obstacle.

Within the black community, all is not exuberance. Many blacks are concerned that Obama’s victory may ease efforts to redress the continuing legacy of slavery and legal discrimination. They are worried that Americans will construe Obama’s victory as evidence of racial equality and ignore the reality that blacks remain stuck on the bottom of most indices of social well-being: from health to wealth, from employment to housing, from education to incarceration.

Despite those fears, the black community is expressing an enormous sense of pride in Obama’s historic accomplishment. He “just has the wind at his back,” is how one elderly black woman summed it up for me. “There’s no stopping him.”

For a people who for 400 years have had the wind in their face, this is quite an accomplishment.

Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of the Chicago-based In These Times magazine (www.inthesetimes.com). He can be contacted at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.