Relief, optimism, foreboding: Black Americans feel mixed emotions on Inauguration Day Sydney Trent From the moment in June 2015 when Donald Trump glided down a golden escalator in Trump Tower to announce his presidential candidacy, James Hudson saw what was coming. That’s because as an older African American, he’d been there before. Hudson, 81, had grown up in segregated Tallahassee. He knew the racism of the burning cross and the racism of Obama birtherism, and he said he knew a racist when he saw one. So while early on much of White America and the media were in denial that a brash and shallow reality TV star could ever become president, Hudson and older generations of Black people saw Trump clearly as the threat he was. The next four years were as horrifying as they were wholly predictable; the stakes in the election in November felt nauseatingly high.