Tuesday morning will begin with an inaugural breakfast at the Plaza Club sponsored by the African American Association of Hawaii and the night will end with a party by National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at the Dole Cannery Ballroom called "The Dream Fulfilled."

In between, Honolulu attorney Andre Wooten will be in Washington, D.C., witnessing firsthand a sight he never imagined.

"In terms of African-American folks, so many people like my mother and myself never expected to see the day when an African-American citizen would be elected president of the United States," said Wooten, past president of the Hawai'i African-American Lawyers Association. "I did not expect to see this in my lifetime."

People of all ethnicities and generations in the Islands can lay claim to Barack Obama, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, who struggled to find his place in Hawai'i's multiracial stew but has used his broad reach to inspire a new generation of Americans to elect him the country's 44th president.

While thousands of Island residents will cheer Obama's inauguration on Tuesday from Washington to Wahiawa, it is Hawai'i's small black community that may yell the loudest. The Islands were home to only 33,000 people who claimed African-American heritage in the 2000 census.

And many, such as Wooten, have fought for years to educate other people in the Islands about racial ignorance toward blacks that would be intolerable in other major U.S. cities.

Alphonso Braggs, president of the NAACP's Hawai'i chapter, will probably have to catch Obama's swearing-in ceremony over his car radio. He will spend Tuesday morning giving a presentation to Navy sailors about Martin Luther King Jr., whose memory will be celebrated the day before.

"On Monday I'll be thinking about Dr. King," Braggs said. "And then on Tuesday I'll witness the reality of his dream. É Because it's something that's never happened, it's hard to compare it to other exciting things. But it's as monumental as the victory after World War II or man landing on the moon."

He added, "The fact that there is a face that looks like mine in the White House, I believe that the people here in Hawai'i have a renewed sense of purpose and they'll commit to working together more."