Barack Obama arrived in Baltimore yesterday on the next-to-last stop of his two-year trip to the White House, paying homage to the city's history as he urged a crowd of 40,000 well-wishers to support and defend America with the same fervor as their counterparts who defended Fort McHenry.
Walking onto a temporary stage at War Memorial Plaza with a shout of "Hello, Baltimore! Thank you, Baltimore!" Obama called on Americans to make sure that his election as the 44th president "is not the end of what we do to change America, but the beginning."
"We are here today not simply to pay tribute to those patriots who founded our nation in Philadelphia or defended it in Baltimore, but to take up the cause for which they gave so much," said Obama, who had left Philadelphia by private train earlier in the day on the way to Washington and his inauguration on Tuesday.
It was a journey of ascendency steeped in symbolism, modeled after an inaugural journey by another Illinois politician, Abraham Lincoln. But unlike Lincoln, who slipped through Baltimore in disguise because of assassination threats, Obama arrived downtown just three minutes behind schedule, threatened only by the near-arctic temperatures.
Complaints were scarce within the ebullient crowd, swollen by people who said they were drawn to the historic nature of Obama's presidency.
Among them was Wanda Green, a 53-year-old Centreville woman who said the memory of her late aunt "compelled her" to attend Obama's speech. Her aunt, she said, raised her while working as a housekeeper for white families on the Eastern Shore. She remembers her scrubbing their floors and ironing their clothes.
"She went through so much, but she told me that one day a black person would do this," Green said. "It sends chills through my body hearing him speak."
Stepping off the train a few hundred yards short of the platform at Penn Station just before 4 p.m., then traveling down St. Paul Street by motorcade, Obama spoke for 15 minutes before climbing down from the stage to greet supporters, hemmed in by a shield of Secret Service agents.
"Baltimore, starting now, let's take up in our own lives the work of perfecting our union," Obama said to shouts and cheers and the muted applause of thousands of gloves and mittens.
