HOW does it feel to be free?” Vice President Richard Nixon once asked of a black guy sitting in the front row of an event held in Ghana to celebrate the country becoming an independent state.

“How the devil should I know?” Came the reply. “I’m from Alabama.”

That was 1958. If you were black, and from one of the southern states of the US, you most certainly were not free.

Condi Rice may be one of the most successful and highly regarded women in the world as US Secretary of State. She’s black too.

When she took my wife and I to Birmingham, Alabama, the city where she grew up, the hurt that she and all other black people felt was palpable about the appalling way they were treated for a whole century after the Civil War was supposed to set them free.

So we saw the turning where her father and his friends had had to barricade their street to keep out the Klu Klux Klan and the white supremacist thugs of the local police from torching their homes and killing innocent people.

And we also saw the 16th Street Baptist Church where four young black girls were burnt to death in a bombing. As Condi once said: “when the Founding Fathers said “we, the people” they didn’t mean people like me”.

Finally, in the sixties, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and black people, and other minorities began their journey from oppress-ion. But every black American I know, howe-ver successful, is aware that there are higher hurdles in their way than in the way of white.

And by “black” I mean anyone who isn’t all white. To racists, if you’re of mixed race, you’re black. Many black people responded to what they saw as double standards in the land of the free by resignation and apathy, by opting out of politics altogether.

Turnouts even in Presidential elections have been low compared to the UK, and ours are not great (In 2004, 56 per cent of the voting age population voted in the Presidential election, while there was 61 per cent turnout in the general election here in 2005).

Overnight on Wednesday that changed. America changed. It is predicted that more than 130 million Americans voted in the election, the most since 1960 and several million above the 2004 figure.

And one of the indelible and abiding consequences of President-elect Obama’s campaign is the way that he at last has given non-whites in the US the power and equality they previously enjoyed only on paper.

I’m personally delighted by Barack Obama’s victory for two reasons.

First, and above all, because of what he and his party stand for.

The Democratic Party is not an exact parallel of the British Labour Party, but it is firmly in the democratic left, part of the progressive consensus as it’s now called.

What Obama has been campaigning for is essentially what we’ve been in business for over decades: things like improving health care, fighting for equal pay for women, supporting low income workers.

The second reason is that Obama’s victory, and the extraordinary scenes which have accompanied it – from the queues of people waiting to vote through to that spine-tingling victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago – proves something dear to me: politics can inspire.

People are interested in being involved, in ideas and in debate.

Democratic politics, the choices and the freedoms it gives, is noble, and Barack Obama showed that.