In 1963, my sister and I made a grand tour of the U.S. One sweltering summer evening we arrived at a small village on the shore of a small lake. Mississippi: conservative deep South. We were exhausted, got a room in the only motel.

The next morning, my sister was the first to see the sign. A weathered piece of wood with the words, Whites Only. We were deeply ashamed that we had spent the night there.

That was only forty-five years ago. That was the time when a black young man who whistled at a white girl would be lucky not to be lynched. The time when the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses, making smoldering evenings hotter.

It was the time of Segregation, black and white separate, but equal before the law. Not really. Blacks could not vote, not even for dog catcher. Blacks lived on the dark side of the moon, and it seemed they would always live on the wrong side of the tracks.

And yet, all that was only forty-five years ago. From that perspective, it is a miracle that on November 4, a black man was elected to be president.

With tears in their eyes, in a shaky voice, African Americans said on television that never, never, had they thought they would live to see this.

That must also have been the thought of a black man who, standing by the Reflection Pool in front of the monument of Abraham Lincoln in Washington D.C., recalled the monumental importance of the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.

As a young man, he had been there — as I had been also — when Martin Luther King gave his “I have a Dream,” talk. He was convinced that even King had never imagined this outcome. King’s dream that in the future people would no longer be judged on the color of their skin but on the content of their character, had come much closer, he thought.

Barack Obama, whose oratory reminds of King’s, in his acceptance speech in Chicago, quoted King, “I may not get there with you…” but “I’ve seen the Promised Land.” King spoke those words the evening before the day he was assassinated, Memphis, April 4th, 1968.

Patricia Law, professor of law at Columbia University, wrote in The Observer that she has benefited greatly from the human rights movement. A touching vignette: her parents moved heaven and earth to get her a Rosa Parks doll. Rosa Parks was the first woman who refused to sit in the back of the bus as a black person was supposed to do.

Indeed, much has changed since then. And now, a black person in the highest position.