Barack Obama will accept the Democratic nomination for president later this month - 150 years after Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas engaged in landmark debates over slavery.
Obama is the nation's first black to win a major-party nomination. He's also a U.S. senator from Illinois. That's the post Lincoln and Douglas were sparring over in debates beginning in late August 1858.
Lincoln lost that election but was soon president and took action to end slavery.
Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo (GHEL'-zoh) of Gettysburg College says it's quote -- "breathtakingly stupendous" -- that a black could be a nominee so soon after black emancipation.
He says most Americans think that's a long time but it's not compared to the slow pace of improved race relations worldwide over the centuries.
Dispatches from Chicago's south side.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
First major black nominee for president 150 years after Lincoln-Douglas debates
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