During the inauguration I was nowhere near the stage but directly adjacent to the White House and right behind the Washington monument. From where I stood, you could see the white moving vans at the West Wing’s door.

Anytime George W. Bush came on the big screen boos would swell from the crowd. From that point of view, white moving vans could be seen at the West Wing’s door.

When the outgoing president and vice president were shown on the big screen, the boos swelled up from the crowd, each time someone nearby saying “There he is” as if they were ready to embarrass him.

Because after all, what kind of show of appreciation is it to boo a president on their way out the door. Ugly, some may say but it wasn’t a very good looking eight years either. Maybe it’s the kind of exit befitting the least popular president in modern American history, with job disapproval numbers above 70 at one point, the worst since Gallup began asking Americans what they think more than 70 years ago.

Towards the front of the crowd they were singing and you immediately have to imagine the world’s perception of the public disapproval of a crowd of two million people.

The people spoke when they elected Bush twice, even with a divided voice. We spoke when we elected Barack Obama. And both Obama and the people spoke again Tuesday, giving him the shaft on the way out the door.

“Go back to Texas and look for those weapons of mass destruction!” a person near me yelled.

“We don’t want him in Texas!” yelled back Keith Matthews, a resident of Dallas, the city Bush will call home after two terms in office. Matthews is a registered Republican who typically votes down party lines in local elections but didn’t vote for Bush in the two previous elections. He voted for Obama in 2008 not just because he was “ready for change” but because he was very disappointed in his Republican ticket and party.

He cried tears of joy after Obama’s swearing in both for the momentous occasion and his parents who lived under oppressive Jim Crow laws.

At the end of the day, people celebrating as they jubilantly boot you out the door is a much softer slap in the the face then the impeachment that never happened or even being arrested and tried for war crimes as some have suggested.

History will likely show Obama’s inaugural speech and actions in his first few days in office and bigger rejections of GW, the man and his policies, then any angry crowd.

One of the best parts of coming to Washington has been getting to know more about my grandma’s sister, Ethel Payne, who I always knew as Aunt Ethel.

She was one the first black woman White House correspondents, starting her career in Japan, publishing work that started in her journal and ended in the pages of The Chicago Defender.

Over a career she would cover the White House through seven American presidents, starting with Eisenhower, eventually earning her the nickname “The First Lady of the Black Press.” She would become America’s first female African-American commentator employed by a national network on the CBS show “Spectrum.”

Her job, she said, was a “box seat to history.”

No question that’s where she was.

She was there for the Montgomery bus boycotts. Desegregation at the University of Alabama. The 1963 march on Washington and several trips around the South and rest of the nation reporting on the Civil Rights movement.

As I understand it, she was the only black woman in the room when the Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964. A decade earlier, her willingness to ask questions others wouldn’t got her in trouble with President Eisenhower when she questioned segregation on interstate highways. Eisenhower wouldn’t call on her again. But she knew who she was writing for, and sought answers on issues her readers wanted to know or should know about.

In today’s stumbling media, her work was a testament to the need for a diversity of perspectives in media. That a well rounded group of people are necessary to pose questions to the powerful.

She filed datelines from Vietnam, Taiwan, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Denmark, Brazil, China and other countries around the world.

Though a citizen of the world, Aunt Ethel’s parents were part of that Great Migration north. She was always a loyal child of Chicago’s South Side, growing up in the Englewood neighborhood with my grandmother and four other siblings. That’s less then five miles from Obama’s old Hyde Park neighborhood and less than 10 from Grant Park where Obama accepted the nomination for president.

Posthumously, she would have her letters, possibly her dining room set and other artifacts moved to places like the Howard University archives, the Anacostia Community museum which is ran by the Smithsonian and the Washington Press Club Foundation.

In 2002 her face was put on a postage stamp as part of a series of stamps for women journalists.

I purposely kept from learning too much about her writing style and works in journalism so I could humbly take the necessary lumps and lessons to become a journalist. If there were shoes I felt needed to be filled, I didn’t want to pressure myself into them. I have my own path to follow.

Now out of school and more comfortable with my own abilities, I sought out people she used to know while I’m in town covering the inauguration. I always knew about here sense of duty, reputation for being a fearless independent voice and unquenchable wanderlust but I’m just beginning to learn more about the details of her life. More to the person she was beyond the rattling, impressive life’s work.

I’ll continue to interview her friends in DC after the inauguration and sift through archives but I wanted to speak with Ethel’s good friend Kathy Brown ahead of Jan. 20 to ask how she thinks Aunt Ethel would have felt to see such history when she spent so much of her life following history and championing progress.

Kathy Brown met Aunt Ethel (we both knew her as Aunt Ethel) in 1964. They would remain good friends until Ethel passed away in May 1991.

The two of us met for an interview after the sermon at Shiloh Baptist Church Sunday. I didn’t count at the time but she’s wearing more than 20 Obama buttons on her hat.

She’s also wearing a mink coat given to her by Aunt Ethel shortly before she died and was able to explain more to me about how Aunt Ethel kept a correspondence with Winnie Mandela and went to South Africa to visit shortly after he was released from prison. How she was close with Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King.

And that it wouldn’t surprise her at all if she knew Barack or Michelle Obama, especially since Aunt Ethel went to Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama’s old church, when she was in Chicago.

So Sarah Pulliam is a reporter for Christianity Today. We worked together a few years ago at the Colorado Springs Gazette. Sunday’s big “We Are One” concert at the Lincoln Memorial and that aired on HBO, starting with the invocation of Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire. It was suggested he was asked to speak to offset the choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation in the inaugural ceremonies. Didn’t really matter. It seems HBO didn’t air Robinson’s prayer.

Maybe it didn’t get air play but it lit YouTube up like a pinball machine. ranked number one in news and politics videos today and made the top views lists in countries around the world. Overall it was fourth most viewed video of the day with 116,344 views (including two myself) since being added Sunday night.

The Presidential Inaugural Committee and HBO has since apologized, saying that he was part of a pre-show and not the main show telecast which started at 2:30, not when Robinson spoke ten minutes earlier. It will be included in updated versions of the concert.

“It is ironic that he wasn’t in our telecast,” they said in a statement “as the whole show conveyed a message of unity and inclusion. He would have fit in perfectly.”

Here’s the prayer’s text in-full.

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president. …

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah. …

I missed the concert at the Lincoln Memorial Sunday but wandered around the mall afterward and ran into Calvin Banks and his mare Carmen.

Banks has been riding horses since he was five-years-old and is a member of the mounted unit of the Maryland Buffalo Soldiers Horse Calvary. The unit goes to area schools to tell students the history of the Buffalo Soldiers and what they stand for.