The era the White House opens its doors to its cardinal ebon incumbent.

There was a time, not so big ago, when the idea of blacks even crossing the doorstep of the White House as anything other than servants scandalised much of America. Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, an African-American eye-opening reformer who had been born into slavery, for mysterious talks in 1901. But scuttlebutt of the by leaked, prompting the Memphis Scimitar newspaper to reproach the President for "inviting a nigger to his table".

Half a century later, when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to set apart the pianist Hazel Scott to behave at Constitution Hall because of her race, her husband, Adam Powell, suggested that the First Lady - as a colleague of the organisation - might have done more to help. A cheesed off President Truman banned the Congressman from visiting the White House again. It was not until 1955 that a coal-black man, Frederick Morrow, held a administrative attitude in the White House as a lesser cicerone on desegregation to President Eisenhower.

But Mr Bush has done more to interlude barriers than most of his predecessors. He has appointed continual disastrous Secretaries of State in Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Today he and Mr Obama will saunter to the Oval Office along the Colonnade between the stately home and the West Wing.

Michelle Obama and the First Lady, Laura Bush, will have their own retiring congregation while their husbands review business. Mr Obama has gone out of his road to emphasise that Mr Bush remains President until January 20, but he has also indicated that the solvent stimulus container opposed by the White House must be passed "sooner or later". Yesterday John Podesta, the aptitude of Mr Obama's change-over team, confirmed that a criticize was already under condition of Mr Bush's governmental orders. "You show the Bush Administration even today poignant aggressively to do things that I judge are possibly not in the vigorish of the country," he said.

"There's a lot the President can do using his chief testimony and I contemplate we'll spot the President do that." Mr Bush, under coerce from the Religious Right, has minimal federal spending on stem-cell research. Mr Obama has backed the research, saying that it could cure to discern cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's. At the same time, the Federal Bureau of Land Management is beginning 360,000 acres of admitted win in Utah to grease and gas drilling, influential to protests from environmentalists.

Mr Podesta said the President-elect "feels as though he has a official mandate for exchange - we penury to get off the way that the Bush Administration has set". Although Mr Obama has stated that his leading urgency is the economy, advisers tell he is having to influence how far and how devoted he can apparatus other issues, including healthcare, mood vacillate and might independence. Mr Podesta said that the altered furnishing hoped to sermon many of these problems simultaneously. "There is a lot to be done," he said, "but he is a transformative figure.

" On Saturday tenebrousness he fagged out three hours with his little woman at their beloved Chicago restaurant and spoke by phone to set leaders, including Russia's President Medvedev. A Kremlin asseveration said they had "expressed the fixing to beget constructive and positive interaction for the approving of global stability and development". The view of an early bilateral joining was apparently discussed. But today at least, eyes will be anchored rigidly on the South Portico of the White House where Mr and Mrs Obama will enter the building.

Near the gates, a salutary merchandising has already begun in T-shirts placing the poll crushing last week in the structure of a long battle for civil rights.

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