Grandma in the House - the White House

Marian Robinson, Michelle Obama's mother, Barack Obama's mother-in-law, will be staying with the Obamas in the White House, at least for a little while. I think that's great. She'll generate a certain amount of attention for that generation of older African American women, the generation who had so few role models of their own. This is real live history.

Mr. Obama felt that sense of history on election night when Mrs. Robinson squeezed his hand as the final results came in.

“You had this sense of, well, what’s she thinking?” Mr. Obama said on “60 Minutes.” “For a black woman who grew up in the ’50s, you know, in a segregated Chicago, to watch her daughter become first lady of the United States.”

I also noticed that Martin Luther King Day this year falls on January 19th, the day before the Inaugural. As an African-American woman in my office put it: "The Dream - realized."