Throughout this extraordinary election, it often seemed as if history itself were campaigning alongside Barack Obama.
It was on August 28, 2008, on the forty-fifth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, that Obama accepted the Democratic party’s nomination, becoming the first black American to be a major party’s presidential candidate.
And on January 20, 2009–one day after Martin Luther King Day–Obama will be sworn in as the first black president of the United States. No doubt the spirits of the civil rights movement, and of movements for racial justice everywhere, will be with him then.
Artist John Mavroudis‘s cover illustration for this week’s print edition of The Nation imagines this inauguration–one witnessed not in flesh and blood, but in the bonds of justice and peace. To identify the historical figures, match the list of names below with the diagram at right.
1. Barack Obama
2. Michelle Obama
3. Martin Luther King Jr.
4. Thurgood Marshall
5. Rosa Parks
6. Barbara Jordan
7. Cynthia Wesley
8. Carole Robertson
9. Denise McNair
10. Addie Mae Collins
11. Emmett Till
12. Susan B. Anthony
13. C.T. Vivian
14. James Meredith
15. Homer Plessy
16. Harvey Milk
17. Ida B. Wells
18. Malcolm X
19. Bayard Rustin
20. John Lewis
21. Mahatma Gandhi
22. Abraham Lincoln
23. Frederick Douglass
24. Cesar Chavez
25. Sojourner Truth
26. Nelson Mandela
27. Stephen Biko
28. Oliver Brown (Brown v. Board of Education)
29. Chief Joseph
30. Lyndon Johnson
31. Medgar Evers
32. Rev. James Reeb
33. Fred Shuttlesworth
34. W.E.B. Du Bois
35. Ralph Abernathy
36. Viola Gregg Liuzzo
37. Marcus Garvey
38. Andrew Goodman
39. James Chaney
40. Michael Schwerner
41. John Brown
42. Jackie Robinson
43. Dolores Huerta
44. Mary White Ovington
45. William Lloyd Garrison
46. Wang Dan
47. Stephen Samuel Wise
48. Harriet Tubman
49. Dred Scott
50. Booker T. Washington
51. David Richmond (and)
52. Joseph McNeil (Greensboro Four)
53. Martin Delany
54. The Little Rock Nine
55. William Still
56. Thomas Garrett
57. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
58. Samuel Burris
59. Thomas Paine
60. Abigail Kelley Foster
61. Jesse Jackson
62. Eugene V. Debs
63. Lucretia Mott
64. Paul Robeson
65. Henry David Thoreau
66. Shirley Chisholm
