A lot of people outside the US have looked to Martin Luther King Junior, and now Barack Obama, for inspiration as they try to even the playing fields in their own countries.

In Peru, the racial texture is complex: Spanish descendants, Indians, mestizos, and blacks have lived together uneasily over the years.

But arguably, it's blacks there who occupy the bottom rung. As The World's Marco Werman tells us, the Afro-Peruvian fusion band Novalima stands for righting that injustice.

Ramon Perez-Prieto, one of the founding members of Novalima, is as surprised as anybody by the prophetic nature of an old tune they cover called "Liberta."

He says, when it was written decades ago, it was a song of the hope of freedom for blacks in Peru.

“And it talks about the future, how this is going to change when the black people can grow up or study to be lawyers, or doctors, or maybe presidents.”

That in fact is the very first line of the song. "Negro sera presidente..."

“We started working on the song a year and a half, or maybe two years ago, and surprisingly, well now in the United States we have a black president, so this song has been like a foretelling story of what would happen eventually, you know?”

"Liberta" is sung here by a new Novalima member: vocalist Milagros Guerrero. She joins the four founders of Novalima. Carlos Li-Carillo is one of them.

“We're not just making the music alone, the four of us which are the producers. We're creating music with also our Afro-Peruvian friends and musicians.”

Carlos Li-Carillo like the other three founders doesn't have African ancestors. But over the years he and his bandmates have watched as racial inequality in their country took its toll on the morale of all non-whites in Peru.

The racial picture in Peru is somewhat different from the US. Only three percent of Peruvians can trace their ancestry back to Africa. But those three percent have experienced the same ills of slavery and the kind of Jim Crow society that followed after.

Carlos Li-Carillo feels personally that music can remind Peruvians just how tied they all are to Africa.

“Most of the traditional music here, except for the Andean music, has African influence. In the coast, we have the valse, the creole valse, and the marinera. Now marinera is used for military bands and stuff. But it's all started with African styles.”

In that sense Novalima is not just a groove band. It's an activist band. And the dividends of their activism have paid off, first when their debut self-titled CD went platinum in Peru in 2002.

And more recently, at a free concert in Lima's main square. It was an annual show that typically features authentic traditional music.

But Novalima felt that the audience's response to their contemporary remix of that traditional repertoire shows their music is having an impact.

“People were cheering. Many of the songs they already know because of our traditional remix. And not a single feeling that this is not suited for the time. It was amazing.”

For Carlos Li-Carillo and Novalima, it's equally amazing that walls that have been up for so long seem to be crumbling at the same time in many places.

For The World, I'm Marco Werman.