America America, Please Lets Shine On This Great Occasion

Stage set for Obama concerts

A series of special events has begun in the US in the lead-up to the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th US president on Tuesday.

A welcome concert is being held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, with U2, Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen among those performing.

Earlier Mr Obama placed a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Virginia to remember fallen American servicemen.

Mr Obama held his hand over his heart at the Arlington National Cemetery.

Sunday’s concert, which also features musicians Stevie Wonder, Usher, Mary J Blige and Sheryl Crow, is expected to draw a crowd of up to half a million people.

The artists have been asked to perform songs suited to the occasion, rather than their own hits, including A Change is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke.

Historical passages are also being read by singer Queen Latifah and actors Jamie Foxx and Denzel Washington.

Security operation

An unprecedented security operation is under way in the capital ahead of Mr Obama’s swearing-in on Tuesday, with the authorities expecting a turnout of up to two million.

Some 240,000 tickets have been issued for the festivities at the Capitol.

For those without tickets, the entire length of the National Mall, which stretches nearly two miles from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, will be open to the public for the first time.

A national holiday honouring the assassinated civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Day, falls on Monday – the eve of the inauguration of the first black US president.

Mr Obama, Vice-President-elect Joe Biden and their families will take part in activities in Washington aimed at encouraging others to help their communities.

On Saturday, Mr Obama retraced the steps of former US President Abraham Lincoln, travelling by train from Philadelphia to Washington.

The 137-mile (220 km) journey began at Philadelphia’s 30th Street station, where Mr Obama said he would be carrying the hopes of ordinary Americans with him to Washington.

You can watch Tuesday’s inauguration live on the BBC News website, as well as on BBC World News and BBC One.

On his desk beside the nameboard that tells you he is director of marching bands at Howard University in Washington DC, John Newson keeps a miniature bale of cotton.

Washington DC – a ruling elite, within a mainly African-American population

When he lifts it and turns it in his hands his eyes take on a curiously distant quality and stories of this country’s divided past come tumbling out.

He is a dignified, professorial figure these days, but he can remember the old times in rural Louisiana when he was put out of school three hours before the local white kids and sent to the local plantation fields to chop cotton – back-breaking work for a little boy in the boiling heat of the Southern summer.

He remembers too the local laws about “eye-balling” – no black man or woman dared to risk making eye contact with any of the white folks in the streets of their little town.

You looked down, or looked away, or you got a ticket and a fine.

Mr Newson’s band, from the college they call “The Black Harvard”, will be marching in the inaugural parade in the heart of their home city – Howard is just a few blocks across town from the White House.

It is a small story of change in a country which has changed enormously since little John Newson was sent out into the cottonfields of Louisiana all those years ago.

He is moved at the idea of a black man taking power in the White House, and not just for what it says about the long road African-Americans have travelled since he baled cotton when he should have been sitting in class or playing with his friends.

Black streets

Washington DC is sometimes called Chocolate City, and it is a curiously divided place.

America’s not exactly accepting us with open arms now just by the election of a black man as president Corey Crane Tour operator

The tiny governing elite – which tends to live and work in the glittering centre – is surrounded by seas of largely black streets.

Mr Newson wonders if Barack Obama might be the man to bring together those two disparate identities sharing the same space.

After all, he commands the ruling elite now, and yet he can still talk comfortably with the black street.

Not that Mr Newson believes the election of Mr Obama means an end to the African-American journey. To illustrate his point he told me this story about what happened when he and his wife took three of their grandchildren back to a four-star hotel in Louisiana a few years ago to show them the Old South in which they had grown up.

“My wife and the three grandkids went to the swimming pool and on two occasions when they got in, all the white folks who were swimming got out and left,” he told me.

“My wife even stayed in the water for nearly two hours to see if they would come back – and they didn’t.”

As Mr Newson said, Barack Obama’s election is a moment of symbolism and he will have huge powers – but he cannot make people stay in swimming pools together.

America – and the South in particular – still have some changing to do.

Messenger boy

James Kilby is another African-American who will be watching the inaugural parade with particular pride.

In the Lyndon Johnson White House in the mid-1960s he was a young messenger boy – probably one of the few ways a black man could get into the building back then.

He lives in Virginia, near Washington, and he too is bruised by the past.

He was in the first group of black students to be enrolled at his local whites-only high school in the town of Front Royal after his father fought a celebrated court case against the local school board.

Many of Washington’s landmarks were built using slave labour

He remembers the wave of intimidation that was unleashed on the family when his father, with the support of the civil-liberties group the NAACP, filed his court papers.

“We had three cows poisoned, a bloody sheet hung over our mail box and night riders driving past the house firing shots at it… even, years later, a burning cross planted in the lawn,” he told me.

“But my father wouldn’t give up – in the end he bought a shotgun. They were some hard times.”

Mr Wilby, a preacher these days, is an optimist and sometimes his optimism pays off.

He always thought that one day he would get an invitation to his high school reunions and eventually, so he did – although he says it was not until 45 years after he had graduated.

He campaigned for Barack Obama and believes the new president really will deliver the change he promises.

Historical error

But not all African-Americans here in DC are so sure.

For another point of view I turned to Corey Crane, who runs a tour company called Chocolate City.

It takes visitors around all the familiar city landmarks like the White House and the Capitol, and then talks about them from the point of view not of the powerful men who occupied them, but of the enslaved craftsmen who built them.

He believes that black Americans made a great historical error in the 1960s when they relaxed their campaign for civil rights and integration at the first sign of progress, turning their back in many cases on the “blacks only” hotels and restaurants which had sustained them during segregation in favour of the businesses which were newly opening to them.

“We thought America was accepting us with open arms as equals, so a lot of what we had and what we owned went by the wayside,” he says.

“And that’s why I say America’s not exactly accepting us with open arms now just by the election of a black man as president.”

Having said that, Mr Crane does also believe that the Obama presidency might help inspire black youngsters to aim high in life and work for more change – and he will be watching the inauguration.

The wider world, and white America, have seized on the election of Barack Obama as a moment of catharsis which somehow lays to rest all the wrongs of the past; talk to African-Americans around Washington DC and a different picture emerges.

They are fiercely proud of the present, and hopeful for the future, but are mindful of the past too.

This is still a divided country and to some extent DC remains a divided capital, or at least a capital with a split identity.

But none of this is meant to detract from the powerful symbolism of the moment when this country’s first black president takes office.

Not for the first time, when the Howard University Band strikes up on Tuesday, the ruling elite and the black street will rub shoulders together in the crowds around the White House.

In the euphoria of the moment at least, we can expect that diverse crowd to be marching in step.

Carolyn McKinstry was almost killed in a racist church bombing in segregated Alabama in the 1960s. The BBC’s Matthew Price asks her what the forthcoming inauguration of America’s first African-American president, Barack Obama, means to her.

Carolyn McKinstry was on her way through the church to its office when she saw the four girls through the open door to the washroom.

“Good morning,” she said, and went upstairs.

Dr King did tell us we might be faced by the dogs, that the policemen might spit on you… but the only appropriate response was always a non-violent response Carolyn McKinistry

When she reached the top, the phone rang. Normally there would be an adult at the church and she would not have answered it.

That day, though, she picked up the receiver.

“Three minutes,” said a male voice on the other end, before hanging up.

Carolyn McKinstry did not know that the church had previously received bomb threats.

The children knew about the tense situation in Birmingham of course, and across the state of Alabama and the whole of the South as well. Often, though, the adults did not tell them everything.

The call perplexed her. Then as she stepped out of the office, the bomb exploded.

“I remember thinking that I heard thunder, and as quickly as I thought that, the windows came crashing down. I fell on the floor. Probably I was there 10 or 12 seconds, and then I heard people running.”

Six hours later – hours of fear and chaos, of anger and hatred – Carolyn McKinstry learned that the four girls in the washroom had not made it out.

Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wasley were all killed in the explosion.

Denise McNair was 11. The others were 14 years old, just as Carolyn McKinstry was on 15 September, 1963, the day white racists blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Institutionalised racism

Today, sitting in that same church, Carolyn McKinstry, speaks with the strength of someone who has faced down injustice, and survived with her dignity intact.

The city she grew up in, the state and the country too, have changed immeasurably in the past 46 years, and in ways she says she never imagined.

The bombing was one of the most notorious attacks of the civil rights era

When Carolyn McKinstry was growing up, state law segregated black people like her from white citizens.

She was forced to use separate schools, dine in different parts of restaurants, to live in different parts of the city.

As a child, she did not always notice the extent of it.

“It was clearly segregated. We were all aware of that, but our parents and our communities made every effort to make sure that we were not missing anything. We didn’t miss what we didn’t know about,” she says.

She was 12 years old when she first remembers thinking about the institutionalised racism that then existed in Alabama.

Her grandfather had brought her grandmother to Birmingham, to try and find her a hospital bed.

“Hospitals did not accept black people, but we found a hospital to place my grandmother in. They placed her in the basement. It became my job as the youngest daughter to sit with her. I sat with her for two weeks until she died. I spent two weeks wondering why we were in the basement.”

The church had received threats before the bombing

Birmingham, and to a certain extent its 16th Street Baptist Church, became the epicentre of the civil rights movement in 1963.

That was the year Martin Luther King Jnr and others came to the city.

“He told us that segregation was not the normal way of things,” she says.

So she went to the mass meetings held at her church, where the civil rights leadership called on the black community to rise up against segregation.

“Dr King did tell us we might be faced by the dogs, that the policemen might spit on you. They might hit you, but the only appropriate response was always a non-violent response.

“When we did march, they brought the water hoses, and I remember thinking no-one had said anything about the water hoses. I remember being a little frightened, but I remember also thinking that… Birmingham was not the only place with segregation laws.

“It was not something you could run from, I did understand that.”

Like thousands of others she did not run.

‘Wonderful culmination’

Today, four decades after she almost lost her life because of the colour of her skin, Carolyn McKinstry still works at the 16th Street Baptist Church.

On Tuesday, she will walk the short distance downtown, a few blocks, into the city’s auditorium, and there she will watch the big screens with awe as an African-American becomes president of her country.

“In Dr King’s speech – his ‘Dream speech’ – he talked about being looked at and evaluated based on the merits of your character and your competence as opposed to what colour you were. I think that we’ve come just about full circle on that,” she says.

“If you’ve lost friends along the way, if you’ve had friends killed through this journey, this is just a wonderful culmination. It says that they didn’t die in vain. It brings true the words that Martin Luther King gave at the funeral of the four girls here.

“He said their blood might well serve as a redemptive force not just for Birmingham, but for America.”

There was a time when a US president could travel from his inauguration in an open-top car.

Secret Service agents will mingle with the crowds

John F Kennedy was the last president to do that.

He was also the last president to be sworn into office without the protection of a bullet proof screen.

Those days have long gone.

Secret Service agents now swarm a new president’s blast-proof limousine as it travels along Pennsylvania Avenue.

But the inauguration still presents a security nightmare.

And Barack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday will provide the biggest challenge yet.

Biggest fear

There have already been painstaking preparations, with rehearsals for security officials – not just for the military precision of the ceremony and the parade.

At a US military base in Washington they have been planning for any eventuality for the past six months.

NO-FLY ZONE See map of road closures

Huge satellite maps of the centre of Washington dominate the control room at Fort McNair.

On the day itself they will be able to track the new president’s every move – and the huge crowds expected to watch.

They are hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.

Major General Richard Rowe takes me through the possible scenarios: a major power failure, a car bomb or multiple ones, a cyber attack, the collapse of a bridge, and panic among the crowd.

He says his biggest fear would be a biological, chemical or radioactive attack.

But they are ready for anything.

Outside the control room, members of the US coastguard show off the latest sensors to detect such a device.

This is only the second inauguration to take place since the attacks on 11 September 2001.

And Major General Rowe reminds me that America is still at war.

In the skies above Washington there is already a sober reminder – helicopters on patrol.

If you are hoping for a glimpse of the new president, get ready for suffocating security and a long wait in the cold

On the big day they will be joined by fighter jets.

Along Washington’s waterways the coastguard will be watching from high speed boats.

Snipers will be positioned on the rooftops near the Capitol building and along the parade route.

Roads and bridges into Washington will be closed to traffic, with sniffer dogs on the subway and thousands of armed police, soldiers and plainclothes agents on the streets.

Elite organisations

In total, there will be 4,000 Washington police, reinforced by another 4,000 officers from all over the country.

Thousands more National Guard members have been called in.

That is on top of the 5,000 professional soldiers and sailors who will be on the ground.

The new presidential limousine will get its first outing

There are 57 different government agencies involved in what has been declared a “National Special Security Event”.

And overseeing the entire operation is the US Secret Service.

It describes itself as “one of the most elite law enforcement organisations in the world”, and has had the task of protecting the president ever since William McKinley’s assassination in 1901.

Its most visible agents are the ones who will be running beside the presidential car.

But there will also be hundreds of others mingling in the crowd.

The Secret Service has already been shadowing Barack Obama for a year.

But since his victory it has been stepping up his protection.

It has also ordered a new presidential limousine.

Dubbed “the beast”, it looks more like a tank than a car.

So far it has only been seen in photos, but the public will get a chance to see it for real on inauguration day itself.

When I asked Ed Donovan – the assistant special agent in charge – about the car’s features, all he could say was that: “It’s made by Cadillac”.

Clearly, it is called the Secret Service for a reason.

Banned items

Agent Donovan says his organisation recognises the “historical significance” of protecting the first African-American president.

It too has rehearsed for any eventuality – whether it is a lone sniper or a terrorist attack.

Preparations for this day have been going on for more than a year, with officials looking at every detail right down to the credentials needed to enter the dozens of inauguration balls.

And then there are the crowds.

Nobody is sure exactly how many people will turn up – estimates vary wildly from the hundreds of thousands up to four million.

Anyone hoping to get near the parade or the swearing-in ceremony will have to go through a security screen, while umbrellas, pushchairs and large banners are among the long list of items that have been banned.

Inauguration Day 2009 may well be the biggest show on earth.

But if you are hoping for a glimpse of the new president, get ready for suffocating security and a long wait in the cold.

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