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The story will be told for generations: A Black man-elegant in his appearance, brilliant in his delivery-beat out the toughest politicians in the nation to become the first Black American president. Reporting from the venerable Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, combs through the data to tell us just how the race was won.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008, 7:00 P.M. (EST)

A few polls had just closed on the East Coast. Crowds had already gathered on both sides of Auburn Avenue, where Martin Luther King, Jr., had led the Civil Rights Movement from Atlanta. The throng filled the sidewalks and the lawn of Ebenezer Baptist Church, a bittersweet warrior of a church, one of the most famous in America.

The people stood holding candles, so many candles that all that could be seen was a sea of blinking diamonds in the velvet night. There was no room to move and too many people to fit into the sanctuary. There was an uncharacteristic air of oneness, of letting others go ahead of you, of making room for fathers with strollers and elders with canes, of smiling into the eyes of the person beside you. The crowd was silent, as if holding its collective breath after so many months of being on the verge of the impossible.

The numbers began coming in. The people scrolled their BlackBerrys and strained to hear on their cell phones. Vermont had been called for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts. But they were expected. The electoral votes were already looking lopsided in Obama's favor.

Then someone shouted, "He won Pennsylvania!" as if she herself had won Pennsylvania, which in a way, she had. The texting sped up, grew more urgent and frenetic. The crowd began to sense change in the wind. People too young to remember the movement began singing spirituals and movement songs from the sixties: "This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine...."

At the side of the church, clumps of people who couldn't get inside stood on their tiptoes, their faces pressed against the sanctuary windows. They held their cameras to the windows and craned to see the election results on the screens inside. "He won Ohio!" a woman reported to the people around her. "We're leading Florida. It's real. Oh, God!"