Annette John-Hall: President Obama needs everyone's help to make history

Now that Barack Hussein Obama has placed his hand on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Bible and taken the oath of office for his second term as 44th president of the United States, the clock begins to tick on history.

Sure, you could argue that Obama made history when he was sworn in as the nation's first African American president four years ago - and he did. Hope and change. First black president. Post-racial society. Talk about giddy with optimism.

Obama stood as the embodiment of everything for which King and the civil-rights movement had cleared the way. Obama's very presence soothed the worn feet of Rosa Parks; justified the Bloody Sunday scar still visible on John Lewis' head; avenged the murders of four little girls in a Birmingham church.

But four years later, King's dream is still far from fulfilled. And for Obama, the real work of history-making begins now.

On the same day that more than 100,000 citizens throughout the Philadelphia region volunteered in the Greater Philadelphia Martin Luther King National Day of Service, Obama told hundreds of thousands of inauguration-goers in Washington that, for us, the people, "preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action."

For the least well-off of us - so often African Americans - it hasn't been easy. Even if we're technically out of the recession, the nation still is struggling - which means black folks are still drowning. According to the latest jobs report, African American unemployment is 14.3 percent, roughly double that of whites. Blacks are also twice as likely to be rejected for loans, and six times more likely than whites to go to jail for comparable crimes.

Heck, it wasn't until 20 first graders were massacred in Newtown, Conn., that President Obama summoned up enough courage to utter the words gun control. To be sure, the fact of race put constraints on a black president seeking a second term. Still, at times it seemed as if thousands of black males dead by guns meant little to him.

The president wouldn't be back in the White House if not for the 90 percent of African American voters who helped reelect him. We've proven a loyal core constituency. So he owes us. Doesn't he?

James Peterson, director of Africana studies and associate professor of English at Lehigh University, says he's a pragmatist when it comes to politics - even when the politician at the head of the table is black.

"I want to get stuff done," Peterson says. "I don't care if the face of gun control is Connecticut or Chicago as long as it serves our kids."

The policies the president implemented on a macro level - health-care reform, or money for community colleges through the federal stimulus package, for example - "certainly did help African Americans in a micro sense," says Michael P. Williams, a black Philadelphia lawyer and a candidate for city controller who worked on the president's campaign four years ago.

As for the disproportionate violence, unemployment, and educational opportunities African Americans face, Williams agrees Obama "needs to look at that, too." Now that he's securely sworn in, "he needs to be responsive to his constituencies, and a second term will allow him to do that."

But the president can't do it alone. Neither did King, for that matter. In her book Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, Duke professor Erica Edwards argues that it's always been the anonymous, everyday people - the small groups of church women, the neighborhood block captains, the student leaders - who have effected real change from the bottom up.

I'm guessing President Obama understands this.

"You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country's course," he said in his inaugural address.

All of us, together, working to make history.