By Lisa Mascaro

Sun, Nov 9, 2008 (2 a.m.)

Washington — On the Saturday afternoon before Barack Obama was elected president, a young black couple waited at a crowded bus stop here in the nation’s capital, trying to get a cab.

Not one, not two, but three taxis passed by. The young man held his hand up and out, wagged it a bit, as cabbies drove past. Some shrugged or offered hand signals to explain their decision, and another whizzing by looked straight ahead.

Must be nice, an older black man in the crowd said, having so much business you don’t have to stop for a fare.

Washington is a predominantly black city. The bus stop on this afternoon reflected that.

Finally a cabbie stopped, and the young man opened the door for the woman, helped her inside, then sent the taxi on its way.

After Obama won the election Tuesday night, revelers converged on the White House to celebrate. The site of past protests became a place to dance in the streets. As I climbed into my own cab home in the early hours of Wednesday, I asked the driver what had been happening.

It was like New Year’s, he told me. Everywhere, people were celebrating.

Of course there is partisanship at work here — it’s an election. The country was tired of the Bush administration and ready for a Democratic president. All the polls said so.

But beyond the party labels, there is an undeniable hope that the country is emerging from the endless loop of its racial past.

Obama always said on the campaign trail the election wasn’t about him, it was about you. The world understood it too, with celebrations that included declaring a national holiday in Kenya, Obama’s father’s birthplace.

Obama made history, yes. But the country did too. CNN commentator David Gergen, who teaches at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, observed that passage of the Civil Rights Act didn’t just liberate black America, it freed white America, too.

The morning after the election, I walked to my own bus stop as the bus was whizzing past. Worried I would be late, I flagged down a cab.

The driver, a black man, had an “I voted” sticker on the dashboard, and I asked him how it went.

He was an older man. I asked whether he thought having a black president would make white people look at black people differently.

He grew up in South Carolina, he told me. Being 80 years old, you know what that means, he said. He couldn’t go to the school he wanted to attend, couldn’t eat in a restaurant — even ordering takeout meant he had to go to the back door.

To tell the truth, he said, he doesn’t think racial differences would fade until the older generation passes away.

Republicans worry now about the long years ahead even as they insist Democrats will overreach and be booted from office in no time.

Polls show the millennial generation helped to propel Obama to office, and when young people have an electoral experience like this, experts say, they tend to become lifelong believers — much the way those who grew up with Kennedy did.

The politics will play out. But the cultural shift is unfolding before our eyes.

Will a young black man on the street be seen differently now, as a potential president?

Some people always knew a young black person could lead the nation. Many others had to see it to believe it.