Long before news organizations began calling Tuesday’s election for President-elect Barack Obama, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said he knew the race was over.

“When I saw the numbers for Pennsylvania, and I knew what was happening in Florida, I knew it was over,” Lowery told BlackAmericaweb.com. “I had already shouted from my intestines through every blood vessel.”

As civil rights leaders savor Tuesday’s election of the country’s first black president, they say that the push for civil rights is even more important now that there will be a leader in the White House sensitive to the concerns of blacks and the poor.

“Even though the color of the leaders may change, the need does not change,” Lowery said.

In 1955, Lowery, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and several other Southern leaders founded SCLC to advocate for civil rights in the South. The organization now advocates for civil rights and human rights in America and around the world.

“The caliber of advocacy and the agenda for justice will not change,” Lowery said.

Charles Steele, the current SCLC president, said civil rights advocates are needed now more than ever.

“Barack Obama can’t do it without us,” Steele told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “He needs us to demonstrate what we need.” Steele uses the March on Washington as an example. “John F. Kennedy was one of our nation’s greatest presidents, but the march occurred while he was in office.

“Civil rights drives politics. Politics does not drive civil rights,” Steele said.

Tuesday night, he attended a worship service and celebration at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the church Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. pastored at the time of his assassination.

“I was there with the Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Bernice King, Martin Luther King III, Christine Farris, the Rev. Raphael Warnock and many others," Steele said.

He struggled to find words to express the feeling that overcame him as the race was called for Obama on TV networks.

“We’ve been fighting for this a long time, but it didn’t have a face to it. I didn’t know it would be Obama. I never thought I would see this in my lifetime,” Steele said.

It is divine intervention that has brought Obama to this point, Steele said.

“God was involved and allowed the fabric of the economic infrastructure to collapse and that got people’s attention,” said Steele. Now positive movement will come from what was produced by a negative chain of events, he said.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a longtime civil rights leader who twice sought the Democratic nomination for president, wept as Obama spoke during a celebration Tuesday in Chicago.

Wednesday night, speaking on CNN’s "Larry King Live," Jackson said, “I was overwhelmed with joy and pain. I think of all of this weight on his shoulders, the powerful opportunity and the price we paid to get there.”

He recalled the 1955 bus boycott that crippled businesses in Montgomery, Alabama, but gained for blacks in that city the respect and equal treatment on public transportation. He recalled the deaths of many who were killed because they dared to register and educate voters in the South.

Obama was elected with strong support from whites in places like Florida, California, Pennsylvania and New York, combined with a strong turnout among black and Hispanic voters across the country.

“Barack Obama has the power to bring about coalitions,” Jackson said on "Larry King Live." “He crosses lines of race and religion. He embodies within his body a sense of hope.”

Martin Luther King III said he knows his parents are looking down on America at this time with a smile.

Also on CNN's "Larry King Live," King said he hopes the new president will .....

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