Rachel Robinson is no stranger to long-delayed triumphs of history. Yet even she never really believed she would live to see what unfolded Tuesday night.

Barack Obama, Democratic nominee, son of a Kansas-born mother and an African father, was elected president of the United States. In African-American communities across the nation, neighbors flocked early to the polls. Many kept campaigning even after pressing Obama’s lever, by raising signs, making calls or simply offering up prayers.

Rachel admittedly took some time before joining in. She studied the way Obama responded to the attack strategy of Republican nominee John McCain. She watched to see how he coped with relentless Republican barbs, epitomized when Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate, suggested that Obama “is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America.”

None of that shocked Rachel, who as a young woman witnessed vitriol in its most undiluted forms. She was more interested in qualities that allow one to rise above the bile. She found what she was looking for during one of the debates, when Obama — under belittling fire from McCain — remained bemused, seemingly unflappable.

At that moment, the widow of Jackie Robinson believed.

Rachel is 86. It has been 61 years since her husband broke the color line in major league baseball — and helped transform the United States.

He took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers despite receiving death threats, in an era when blacks who challenged barriers faced real risks of being killed. The game itself hardly provided any sanctuary. The abuse from other players could be vile and profane.

Jackie endured. He played with relentless brilliance, opening the door for other blacks to excel in the major leagues. As much as any figure in American history, he made it impossible for millions of white Americans to justify the absurdity of segregation. For decades, he was the unrivaled model, the historic template, for American diversity.

He got some company Tuesday, when Obama was elected.

Even during Jackie’s hardest moments, Rachel said, she didn’t feel sorry for her husband. And her ultimate compliment to Obama is the way she proudly realized that he didn’t need her to feel sorry for him either.

“Men like that put themselves in those positions,” said Rachel, who established the Jackie Robinson Foundation in New York City. “They want to do something, they want to create change. I always felt (Jackie) could stand up, and I never felt he would wilt under (the abuse) or be unable to manage it.”

Obama, she said, shares those qualities.

That said, Rachel understands how lonely it can be in the spotlight. She recalls how she always wanted to be at Jackie’s games. When spectators would shout vicious racial insults, she would raise her shoulders and sit a little taller, believing she might somehow block those words. On the way home, she was there if he needed to talk, although Rachel said her husband did not want her shouldering his burden.

While Jackie might be quiet for a while if the hatred at a game had been especially extreme, Rachel said, he did not curse or shout at their children. Whatever pain he felt remained inside — to be released only on golf balls, on a nearby driving range.

Once he retired from baseball, he threw himself into the struggle for civil rights. Rachel speaks with pride of his many calls and letters to national leaders. Jackie would insist the time for caution was long past, that timid calls for cultural patience would only prolong the suffering of many blacks.

When he died, in 1972, there were no black candidates with any real hope to win the White House. Rachel was asked if Jackie would have believed that a person of color would be elected by now to the nation’s highest office.

No, she said.

She just wishes he could be here to see it.

“He would have felt vindicated in some ways,” she said. “He always said young people were capable of doing more than they were permitted to do. He would have been so proud, and so excited, and I’m sure he would have been as active in the process as he could have been.”

Jackie, she believes, would have seen the election as a tremendous step — but just a step — toward changing entrenched inequalities. What happened Tuesday cannot, by itself, end the violence that torments too many cities. It cannot change the disproportionate odds that a young man of color will end up dead or in prison. It cannot rebuild crumbling schools, or shield despairing children from addiction, or lift millions of families out of poverty.

To Rachel, that will only happen if Obama can generate real hope, if he becomes a leader of such passion and commitment that our nation collectively decides to heal those wounds.

She believes we elected the right man for the task.

“Yes, I am an optimist,” she said. “I refuse to be cynical or pessimistic or complacent.” She still goes to work at the foundation in Manhattan, where her goal is encouraging young people to emerge as “the kind of citizens who can carry on the legacy.”

While she has yet to meet Obama, Rachel recalled a favorite saying of her husband’s that is now on Jackie’s tombstone, a saying she might someday share with our new president:

“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”

She expects Obama knows that. It’s why men like him sign up.