The 2008 presidential campaign has been going on for so long, the candidates have become so familiar, that it is easy to forget the momentous nature of this year's election. This week, Sen. Barack Obama will become the first African-American in the history of a country divided for centuries by race to be nominated by a major political party for president.

How big a deal is this? Consider the stark contrast found in the annals of the last Democratic presidential nominating convention held in Denver: the convention of 1908.

One hundred years ago, the Denver convention was a largely white male affair. Except in a few states, women were not allowed to vote. Blacks had been systematically disenfranchised throughout the South. More alarming was the horrendous frequency with which blacks were being lynched in southern states. And yet when African-American leaders urged the Democratic presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan, to get behind a platform that opposed lynching, Bryan flatly declined.

To make sense of his position, it's important to place yourself in the context of the times. Bryan, the populist leader of his day, was known as the Great Commoner, but his political sympathies - like those of many other Democrats - were reserved for whites. Some Democrats were racists, others felt a political need to kowtow to southern politicians. Some, including close allies of Bryan in Congress, were members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Indeed, while the Republican platform that year championed the GOP as "the consistent friend of the American Negro," and deplored efforts to keep blacks from voting as "un-American and repugnant to the Supreme law of the land," the Democrats made no mention of blacks, despite the vicious tenor of American race relations. In fact, the only mention of race in the Democrats' platform was one crude reference to immigration: "We are opposed to the admission of Asiatic immigrants who can not be amalgamated with our population, or whose presence among us would raise a race issue and involve us in diplomatic controversies with Oriental powers."

In turn-of-the-century America, Southern blacks were systematically kept from voting by property and literacy requirements and by poll taxes. Many regions created whites-only primary elections. The southern press was filled with what historian C. Vann Woodward called "Negro atrocity stories." State laws provided for segregated railroad cars, soda fountains, parks, cemeteries and, of course, schools. There was a new racist strain to the scholarship of the period, which included titles like The Negro: a Beast and The Negro, A Menace to American Civilization. Needless to say, race relations in the post-Reconstruction period were deteriorating rapidly.

The theme of the Democrats' 1908 Denver convention was "Shall the people rule?" The platform declared, "The conscience of the nation is now aroused to free the government from the grip of those who have made it a business asset of the favor-seeking corporations. It must become again a people's government and be administered in all its departments according to the Jeffersonian maxim, 'equal rights to all; special privilege to none.' "

One hundred years on, those words ring hollow when we realize that "all" didn't mean "all" and that "special privilege" was, in fact, what the party was all about. This week, the symbolism of redemption is enormous.

You don't have to be an Obama voter to find joy and pride in the dramatic step the Democratic Party and our nation is about to take.