CHICAGO -- He entered the White House a living symbol, breaking a color line that stood for 220 years.
Barack Obama took office, and race immediately became a focal point in a way that was unprecedented in American history. No matter his accomplishments, he seemed destined to be remembered foremost as the first black man to lead the world's most powerful nation.
But eight years later, Obama's racial legacy is as complicated as the president himself.
To many, his election was a step toward realizing the dream of a post-racial society. He was dubbed the Jackie Robinson of politics. African-Americans, along with Latinos and Asians, voted for him in record numbers in 2008, flush with expectations that he'd deliver on hope and change for people of color.
Some say he did, ushering in criminal justice reforms that helped minorities, protecting hundreds of thousands of immigrants from deportation, and appointing racially diverse leaders to key jobs, including the first two black attorneys general. These supporters say he deserves more credit than he gets for bringing America back from the worst recession since the Great Depression, the killing of Osama bin Laden, and a major expansion of health care that secured insurance for millions of minorities. They celebrate his family as a sterling symbol of black success.
But Obama also frustrated some who believe he didn't speak out quickly or forcefully enough on race or push aggressively enough for immigration reform.
And his presidency did not usher in racial harmony. Rather, both blacks and whites believe race relations have deteriorated, according to polls. Mounting tensions over police shootings of African-Americans prompted protests in several cities and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Perhaps most strikingly, the president's successor, Donald Trump, is seen by many as the antithesis of a colorblind society, a one-time leader of the "birther" movement that spread the falsehood that Obama was born in Africa. Trump's strong reliance on white voters was in sharp contrast to the multiracial coalition that gave Obama his two victories.
"President Obama represents the face of the future — multicultural America. Donald Trump represents the old racial order of the black-white divide," says Fredrick Cornelius Harris, director of the Center on African American Politics and Society at Columbia University. "And for the next decades to come, there will be a battle between those two viewpoints of what America is."
It took more than two centuries for America to elect a black president. It will take many years after he leaves office to sort out what it all meant.
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"If he can do it, I can do it, too." -- Cheryl Johnson, of Chicago's Altgeld Gardens public housing project, on Obama as a lasting symbol.
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Two iconic images of the Obama presidency:
The president patiently bends over as a 5-year-old black boy touches his head, after the child asked Obama if they had the same kind of hair.
A 106-year-old black woman joyfully dances with the president and first lady, beaming as she declares: "I am so happy. A black president. Yay!"
Born a century apart, these two visitors to the White House convey the potent symbolism of Obama's presidency, a luster that hasn't dimmed. For many black Americans, it's not so much what policies Obama proposed but his mere presence in the Oval Office that has mattered most.
"You can't put a price tag on that," says Loretta Augustine-Herron, a former community activist who worked with Obama in Chicago's Altgeld Gardens in the 1980s. "If he never did anything else for African-Americans, just the fact that he occupies the White House, it lets us see ourselves in a different light. ... We see a chance for us to fit into the United States society in a way we've never fit in. Just knowing that opportunity is not everybody else's, it's OURS, too. ... The sky is the limit. And it was never that feeling before."
Perhaps nowhere are those sentiments stronger than at Altgeld Gardens, where a 20-something Obama honed his political skills as a community organizer.
It was there, in the shadow of rusted steel mills, where Obama had his first up-close exposure to a black community mired in poverty. In his memoir, "Dreams from My Father," Obama describes the sprawling housing project in "a perpetual state of disrepair" with crumbling ceilings, backed-up toilets and burst pipes. He helped residents agitate, rally and fight City Hall to improve their lives.
Three decades later, Altgeld is in the middle of a massive renovation. Crime and poverty persist, but there's also a sense of hope, especially for kids who, for the first time, see a president who looks like them when they walk by Obama's photo on their schoolroom walls.
Cheryl Johnson is among the few remaining residents who remember Obama's organizing days. He plotted strategies with her mother, Hazel, a well-known environmental activist. Johnson, who followed in her footsteps, sees Obama as an inspiration.
His presidency, she explains, allowed people to say: "If he can do it, I can do it, too."
"It's the influence, the motivation that he has given to people who may have been hopeless in their life, like, 'I can't get this far,'" Johnson says. "Now you hear young people, young as 5 and 6, saying, 'I'm going to be the next president of the United States.'"
Obama changed perceptions of black people, says Ellen Singletary, a youth specialist at Altgeld. "The media depicts us ... in such an unfair and defaming way," she says, "and to see the pride of who we really are demonstrated on the world stage means the world to me."
That attitude is part of what Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown professor and prominent African-American commentator, described in a New York Times op-ed as black America's "unrepentant love affair" with the president. That pride, he wrote, overlooks Obama's failings, including skimping on black cabinet appointees until his second term, forgoing the nomination of a black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court and a "reluctance to highlight black suffering."
Still, Obama maintained an 80-90 percent approval rating in the Gallup Poll among African-Americans for virtually his entire presidency.
Many black supporters are proud of how he weathered the birther movement, racial slurs, photos depicting him, among other things, as an African bone-through-the-nose witch doctor or an ape, and other indignities such as a Southern congressman interrupting the president's health care address by yelling, "You lie!"
"One of the sayings we have down in Alabama is when you wrestle with a pig, the pig enjoys it and you're the one that gets muddy," says Glennon Threatt, an assistant federal public defender in Birmingham, Alabama. "The president has not gotten in the mud.
"What he has done is shown that a black man can be a successful president and a successful husband and a successful father," he adds. "I think that's an extraordinary thing."
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"The fact that he got anything done is impressive in hindsight." -- Qwanchaize Edwards, Chicago law student, on the hope that Obama's election would bring reform.
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At the beginning, Americans of color looked forward to seeing what action would come from having one of their own in the White House.
Emanuel Cleaver, a Missouri congressman and former head of the Congressional Black Caucus, remembers one first-term meeting during which caucus members appealed to Obama to seek funds for a program to reduce unemployment among black youth. The president's response reflected his governing style: He said he'd advocate for a program for all youth.
It's consistent with how Obama has always described himself — the first black president, not the president of black America. Dyson once noted Obama's preference for a universal approach, pointing to something the president told him in a 2010 interview: "I've got to look out for all Americans and do things based on what will help people across the board ... "
Qwanchaize Edwards, who grew up in Altgeld Gardens, says he initially hoped Obama's community organizing past would spur him to pursue the kind of Great Society social programs enacted by President Lyndon Johnson. But he understands why that was impossible.
Some people will say Obama "knows the South Side of Chicago. He knows poverty. He should have done more," says Edwards. "But I think if you look at ... all the factions that he had to deal with, he probably got as much as he could get done. So he didn't do enough for poverty, but I don't blame him."
Obama faced a solid wall of GOP resistance to much of his agenda, although some question whether the opposition was strictly ideological.
Lorenzo Morris, a Howard University professor, notes some Republicans publicly announced they'd oppose his programs even if they agreed with them.
"So if you start off with such intense hostility that if you don't call it racial, it's hard to know what to call it except stupid," he says. "I would think it's reasonable for African-Americans to say he should have done more ... but they are still wrong because there's very little he could do. Probably the biggest mistake was if HE thought he could do more."
Obama and his supporters do offer a list of accomplishments, pointing to policies they say helped all Americans and, in doing so, improved the lives of minorities.
The Affordable Care Act led to health care coverage for some 20 million Americans, including about 4 million Hispanics and 3 million African-Americans, according to federal statistics. However, its fate is uncertain because of Trump's vow to repeal and replace it.
On criminal justice, Obama pushed for the law that reduced disparities between mandatory crack and powder cocaine sentences that had put blacks behind bars longer than whites. And he commuted the sentences of nearly 1,200 federal inmates, almost all of whom were incarcerated for nonviolent drug crimes.
Obama focused a "very bright light on how unfair, syste ...
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