This photo shows just how much history was made on Inauguration Day
Here’s the photo:
Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff attend a televised ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial on January 20, 2021 in Washington, DC.
It’s a striking image. Harris, the first female vice president and the first Black and South Asian vice president, framed by the man known as the “Great Emancipator.”
It was, for me, a moment of affirmation and possibility that America has — and always must — represent.
At a moment even Biden acknowledged is historically tough — “Few people in our nation’s history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we’re in now,” he said in his inauguration speech Wednesday — the photo of Harris celebrating at a monument to the man who fought and won the Civil War functions as a reminder that progress toward a more ideal union continues apace.
No, it’s not always as fast as we want or expect. And not always in a perfectly straight line. The election of Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president, was followed by the election of Donald Trump, for example. Two weeks before Harris wrote her name into the history books on the West Front of the US Capitol building, violent rioters were swarming that same space to protest false claims that Biden and Harris hadn’t actually won.
History — and progress — proceeds in fits and starts. But it proceeds.
