Reflecting Obama’s achievement in winning the nation’s highest office as a black man, the benediction was delivered by the Rev. Joseph Lowery, founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an engine of the civil rights movement.

Lowery pulled laughter from the crowd with a rhyme familiar in many of America’s black churches:

“We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right,” Lowery, 87, prayed. “That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.”

The crowd thundered back, “Amen!”