On Jan. 20, 2009, more than one million people thronged Washington, D.C., attending the historic inauguration of the first African American elected president of the United States — Barack Obama.

For most enduring bitter cold on that Tuesday it was their first ever attendance at a presidential inauguration. And for many in D.C., across America and around the world, seeing a Black man taking the presidential oath of office was an event they never thought they would witness.

When Obama formally entered the Oval Office, an economic free-fall was in full effect with factories closing and mortgage foreclosures accelerating.

Yet, the greed that collapsed the economy in the U.S. and economies around the world continued unabated among the wealthy.

Too few among those power elite in America’s corporate, legislative and religious ruling spheres heeded the perceptive observation Obama made during his inaugural address: “A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.”

Compounding the troubles Obama inherited radiating from the economic mess was a listless Democratic Party leadership on Capitol Hill and unprecedented recalcitrance from Republicans where partisan hostility veered proudly into personal hatred.

Three years after that historic 2009 inauguration, Obama enters a re-election run as America remains in the cold winter of economic collapse.

Some see no reverse of this economic collapse, irrespective of the expectations advanced by Obama and the hyped campaign trail promises of GOP candidates vying to challenge him.

“This economy isn’t going to get better. Both political parties are lying,” said Temple University professor Tony Monterio during a recent speech to a labor organization.

“The system we live under is unsustainable and the more unsustainable it becomes the more hateful it becomes. The political and economic systems have turned against the people.”

During this presidential election year the White House will spin any sliver of economic improvement, but the chill for those historically frozen out remains.

In January 2011, the unemployment rate for Blacks in America sat at 15.7 percent compared to 8.1 percent for whites. By December 2011, the unemployment rate for whites dipped to 7.5 percent yet the black rate ticked up a tad to 15.8 percent.

“While the jobs picture in the national economy began to improve slightly during 2011, the Black community experienced little of this growth,” stated a report released in mid-January in the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center.

Few realistically expected an Obama presidency to have the magic-wand impact of substantially ameliorating disparities entrenched by centuries of institutional racism.

However, few Blacks expected an Obama White House to place low priority on addressing problems festering in Black communities like high unemployment that pre-dated the December 2007 onset of the recession.

Yes, the president faced overt opposition from Republicans and had to contend with latent racial animosities roiling in American society but the inability and/or indifference of the Obama White House to address race-based inequities is a sore point for many in the Black community.

“Highly questionable” is the tag Bruce A. Dixon, managing editor of the Black Agenda Report, gives to the strategy of holding back on Black demands for economic and social justice as not to visibly pressure the Black president for fear of providing fuel to his many enemies.

This “silencing of Black demands” Dixon wrote in a commentary posted recently on BAR is “no longer a tactic … It’s a religion, rigorously enforced by the Black misleadership” against Black critics highlighting the painful reality that “Black poverty and joblessness are at levels not seen in 70 years.”

The president’s seeming stiff-arm of Black concerns also serves as fodder for Black Republicans.

“Is it white America’s fault that they helped elect a Black president that took almost two years before he met with the Congressional Black Caucus (despite meeting with gay and Hispanic groups sooner and more frequently),” asked Raynard Jackson, president of a D.C.-based public relations/government affairs firm in a recent commentary.

“Here you have the first Black president of the U.S. who is doing everything in his power to ignore the very community that gave him 96 percent of their vote.”

Disappointments with Obama, the person and his policies, are not limited to persons of color domestically.

Duale Yusuf, a member of the Somalia Youth Congress, expressed particular disappointment during a London protest in November with President Obama for bringing more bombs than books to Africa, breaking promises to Africans that he would institute constructive rather than destructive policies.

“We tell Obama to remove the CIA from Mogadishu torturing people. We are not terrorists in Somalia. We want schools, and hospitals like in the U.S. and Britain,” Yusuf said about his homeland wrecked by twenty years-plus of civil war following the over-throw of an American aligned dictator in 1991.

American military activities on the African continent have escalated steadily under the Obama administration, encompassing assaults against terrorists suspected of links to al Qaeda, enlarging the U.S. military command in Africa (AFRICOM) and joining the Britain and French in overthrowing Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi this year.

Affiong L. Affiong, a Nigerian-born activist once imprisoned in her homeland for opposing human rights violations, feels President Obama (whose father was Kenyan) has not been good for Africa.

“I think Obama is the classic case of neo-colonialism.”

While Obama has certainly fallen short on some issues important to Blacks, compared to his race-baiting GOP challengers, there’s no comparison.

Linn Washington Jr. is a graduate of the Yale Law Journalism Fellowship Program.