RADFORD -- Two days after the inauguration of the nation's first black president, the first black elected governor came to a building named for Radford University's first black president to speak about the state of American society and the power of a simple idea.

Former Gov. Doug Wilder spoke at Radford's commemoration of Martin Luther King's life, but his focus on Thursday in the Covington Center was on what Barack Obama's presidency means for America's future.

"You can never say to a single child in America, 'You can't be president.' " Wilder said. "You impregnate a child's mind with that notion -- you can be anything you want to be -- wooh."

He calls Obama's election a catharsis.

"It has the potential for relieving tensions and built-up emotions," Wilder said. "And purifying at the same time. It's a new day. The question is what we do with it."

The notion that the country has entered a post-racial era is crazy, he said. But maybe, he added, the nation has gotten to the point that race won't be as big an issue as it has been.

"We know it is not an absolute barrier," he said.

Wilder became convinced of that a long time ago. As a child, he learned about the Declaration of Independence. He asked his mother what "inalienable" meant. She told him that meant something that no one could take away.

"Does that mean me?" Wilder asked his mother.

"That means you," she answered.

"It was too late then for anything to tell me different," Wilder said. "My mama told me."

So Wilder's young mind was impregnated with that powerful notion.

The grandson of slaves, he became a state senator, serving in what had the been the capital of the Confederacy. He became lieutenant governor, then governor, serving from 1990 to 1994, his office just a stairway away from a bust of Jefferson Davis and a statue that marks the spot where Robert E. Lee accepted command of Virginia's armed forces rebelling against the United States. Outside, another statue honors Harry Flood Byrd, leader of a political machine that closed Virginia's schools rather than let black children attend class with white children.

"When people ask me, 'How could you get elected there, in that place?' I say, 'Because that's where we all started, right here in Virginia,' " Wilder said.

The state Capitol was designed by Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote that phrase about inalienable rights that helped inspire Wilder decades ago.

His success, and Obama's success, hold a few simple messages, in Wilder's view.

"It makes me believe that my mother was right when she told me I could be anything I wanted to be if I prepared myself and persevered and let no one turn me around," Wilder said. And it reminds him of the debt owed to those who came before.

"I stood on the shoulders of a whole bunch of people. He does, too," Wilder said of Obama. But honoring the past doesn't require living in the past.

"I think some people think that if we acknowledge that progress has been made and is being made, that you're copping out. And that you're saying that there's no need for the struggle, which is crazy," Wilder said.

Obama's presidency offers an opportunity and an example to move beyond all that, he said.

"It stops us from the woe and lamentation of years past, saying, 'We shall overcome.' Hell, let's do it," Wilder said. "Stop singing about it and do it."