History was not on my mind when Barack Obama became the first black to become a presidential nominee for a major political party.

No, my first thoughts were of the people I knew that are no longer with us who lived in America during some of its darkest racial moments. They would have truly enjoyed Tuesday night when Mr. Obama claimed the Democratic Party's nomination in his strong baritone.

People like former Augusta State University professor Joe Greene, who rose from poverty in rural Emanuel County to become chairman of the University of Georgia Board of Regents. I still miss our conversations about racial politics in Augusta and how destructive they were -- and still are.

People like Phil Waring, a chronicler of black history in Augusta who never failed to share with me when I needed his deep well of knowledge on the subject.

People like D.D. Boston, my former principal at Emanuel County Elementary and High in Swainsboro, Ga., whose dignity never left him even as he was forced out of the head job -- like a lot of other black principals at the time -- when ECEH merged with the all-white school during integration.

People like my grandfather, "Dobie" Hudson, the product of a taboo relationship between a white man and black woman who could have easily passed for white to make life easier for him but chose not to.

I was not alone in my melancholy. Longtime Aiken County Council member Willar Hightower wished his father had lived to see this moment in American history. He talked of his father telling him how he'd once witnessed a lynching, but would say little else about it. The only other thing Mr. Hightower could recall his father saying is that "he wished he'd had the nerve to do something about it."

So, that's why Mr. Hightower's voice catches slightly when he says this of his father: "Can you imagine, from where he's come from, if he had seen Obama (Tuesday night)?"

I know how he feels. I thought about my mother, Dorothy Wynn, while watching Mr. Obama's speech. I thought of how she would always write to the local newspaper in Swainsboro when she felt that it had printed something that wronged her community. I thought about how people would always seek her out when they had a grievance because they knew she wouldn't back down. I thought about how she stood up for some black female inmates who claimed they'd been abused in the local jail, and wound up losing her seat on the county school board because of it.

This is what I thought about. Tuesday night was for people like you, Mama. We'll talk again on Nov. 4.