A historic night: pictures and words from the Obama-bration in downtown St. Paul

Jubilant Democrats celebrated Barack Obama’s historic victory at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown St. Paul last night. While the president-elect’s coattails proved largely non-existent in Minnesota — with a pair of tightly contested House races falling to the GOP and the U.S. Senate race knotted in a virtual dead heat — few seemed concerned by the split verdict. The election of the first African American president in the country’s history was sufficient cause for jubilation.

“I don’t want to bring race into it, but we’re extremely proud that Barack Obama is the president of the United States,” said Gregory Demmings, pictured above with his niece and nephews. “After all the things we suffered, he rose above that.”

The Minneapolis resident says he believed Obama would become president after seeing him at the Target Center in February. “I said, ‘That’s the president of the United States,’” he recalls. “I knew. I knew it was time. He convinced me that he was the president.”

Demmings figures, however, that Obama will be held to a different standard because of skin color. “In reality him being an African-American puts him in a precarious situation because he has to be better than the rest,” he says. “He has to do twice as much to get half the respect that he’s entitled to. But he’s capable of doing that.”

Watching Obama’s victory speech.

Veteran DFL activist Roy Magnuson takes in the triumphant scene in Grant Park.

Minneapolis City Council member Ralph Remington says he used to tell his parents when he was a kid that he was going to grow up to be the first black president of the country. “This is monumentally unbelievable,” he said. “I can’t even comprehend right now what this really means. I’ve been moved several times to tears, just waves of emotion.”

Remington believes that African-Americans of the post-civil rights generation (like himself and Obama) have a different view of race relations from their forbears. “We don’t come to any of this from an idea of victimization,” he says. “It’s about all of us are better than some of us. We’re all part of the same organism.”

Remington says he first came to believe that Obama could win after knocking on doors for the candidate in Des Moines before the Iowa primary. “I knew in Iowa that something occured there that this world had never seen before,” he says, “and now we see the fruition.”

With the U.S. Senate race too close to call, Al Franken addressed the crowd around 11:30. “No matter what happens tonight, know this: we have changed this country.”

St. Paul School Board member Tom Goldstein figures he’s spent more than 100 hours volunteering for the Obama campaign over the last six weeks. “You can’t ignore the historic nature of it, but I always saw him as just a brilliant guy,” he said. “I thought he was brilliant in the same way that John Kennedy was brilliant. I saw similiarities. I thought, Is America ready for a really brilliant guy to lead them? Compared to someone like Bush, who’s an idiot? If America was a brand it’s in the toilet, and now Obama’s revived the brand.”

Shortly after 1 a.m., still hoping for a Franken celebration.

From left to right: Devon Lee, Tyrese Lee and Jefferson Lee, V