As soon as the news buzzed on their phones, Americans gathered spontaneously on street corners and front lawns — honking their horns, banging pots and pans, starting impromptu dance parties — as a vitriolic election and exhausting four-day wait for results came to an end Saturday morning. And for all that joy, there was equal parts anger and mistrust on the other side.

Across the United States, the dramatic conclusion of the 2020 election was cathartic. Just after The Associated Press and other news organizations declared that former Vice President Joe Biden beat President Donald Trump, fireworks erupted in Atlanta. In Maine, a band playing at a farmers’ market broke into the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

People waved Biden signs from car windows and balconies, and a massive pro-Biden crowd gathered in the streets outside the White House. In New York City, some stopped their cars wherever they happened to be, got out and danced in the streets. Car horns and bells echoed through neighborhoods across Puerto Rico. In Louisville, Kentucky, Biden supporters gathered on their lawns to toast with champagne. In Kansas City, they swayed in a park to the song “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang.

Trump’s supporters have for days been protesting outside of ballot-counting operations, alleging without evidence that the slow-moving results were proof of cheating. “This isn’t over! This isn’t over! Fake news!” some shouted Saturday as about 1,000 gathered at the Georgia State Capitol after news organizations’ decision to call the election.

But across America, it was mostly the Democrats taking to the streets in jubilant displays, celebrating what was to them an end to four years of constant crises, chaos and anxiety.

In New York City, some chanted “the nightmare is over.”

“It’s surreal, I feel like I’m free from the clutches of evil,” said Lola Faleit, a 26-year-old human resources manager. “In 2016, we woke up crying. Today we are celebrating. Look, the sky is clear blue, the sun is out, Mother Nature is celebrating, too.”

The nation paused, too, to reflect on electing its first woman vice president, Kamala Harris. Amid a celebration in Berkeley, California, where Harris spent much of her childhood, Mayor Jesse Arreguin said the liberal city’s diversity and progressive values helped shape Harris into a “leader that stands for equality, empowerment and justice.”

The news for some collided with the constant churn of crises the country has faced — the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 236,000 Americans, the economic recession that accompanied it, gun violence and police killings that have forced a national reckoning on racism.

“America can exhale. Decency, civility and democracy won,” said Fred Guttenberg, who became an outspoken opponent of the president after his 14-year-old daughter Jaime was one of 17 slain by a gunman at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018. He had been sitting in front of his television since waking up Saturday, waiting for the news. He said it made him “ecstatic.”

In Minneapolis, Ella Mitchell, 30, and Pardha Ponugoti, 29, visited the memorial at the street corner where George Floyd died.

Ponugoti said it was important to be at the Floyd memorial to mark Biden’s win. “It’s like a reminder of the problems that still exist in our society. Just because Biden is president doesn’t mean that all these systemic issues are fixed.”

For many, Nov. 7 at 11:25 a.m., became a moment of such historic magnitude that they say they will forever remember what they were doing, even those engaged in the most mundane weekend activities.

Retired teacher and school principal Kay Nicholas, 73, was vacuuming in her home northwest of Detroit when she heard Biden had been declared the winner.

“All I could say is ‘thank God,’” she said, choking up. “It has nothing to do with Democrat or Republican. It has to do with decency. This country has got integrity and hopefully we can get decency. I think Joe Biden can do it and bring back kindness.”

Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, learned the news when her mother called as she wrapped up a run.

Trump was playing golf.

In Atlanta, Kristin Felder, 36, found out while she was delivering a Panera food order for DoorDash.

“The lady I was delivering it to said ‘Biden won!’ And I said ‘Oh my god!’” she recalled. She started crying, and she cancelled her next delivery to join an impromptu party gathering in midtown Atlanta, where people banged pots and pans, wept together, and toasted champagne.

Scott VanderWal, a farmer in Volga, South Dakota, said he heard the news as he was loading hay bales into his barn.

Unlike those celebrating in the streets, he said he was disappointed, but held out a glimmer of hope that Trump could still contest the results and find path to victory: “I wouldn’t say it’s totally over until all the legal avenues are exhausted,” he said.

More than 100 pro-Trump demonstrators assembled outside Florida’s state Capitol in Tallahassee Saturday afternoon. The crowd toted signs suggesting the election was fraudulent, and they chanted “stop the steal.”

Dozens of the president’s backers began gathering, too, from North Dakota to Georgia to the election tabulation center in downtown Phoenix, where counting remains underway.

Shortly after the news broke, Jake Angeli yelled, “This election has not been called!” Angeli, a regular at pro-Trump rallies who typically wears a wooly fur hat with horns, shouted. He remained hopeful: “Trump always looks like he’s going to lose. And then he wins,” he said.

Chris Marks from Traverse City, Michigan, also expressed distrust in how the votes were counted, suggesting all the votes should be recounted, or that the country should hold another election.

Trump has not conceded and has refused to promise a peaceful transfer of power, and many Americans remained anxious about what will happen in the days and weeks ahead.

But for Biden supporters at home and abroad, Saturday was a day to celebrate, dance and dream of a less contentious future.

Residents of Ballina, Ireland, Biden’s ancestral hometown, had draped the streets in American flags and Biden-Harris banners for days as they awaited the results. Joe Blewitt, a heating and plumbing engineer and a cousin of Biden’s, said the town was ecstatic.

“Now he’ll be the President of the United States, they’re delighted, they’re absolutely delighted,” Blewitt said. “To think one of their own is one of the most powerful men in the world.”

In Egypt, a 49-year-old civil servant named Abdallah was playing backgammon with friends at a coffee shop in the capital, Cairo, when the television networks aired the news.

“The crazy man has gone,” he shouted. “Trump of America was defeated.”

And in Kenya, where presidential elections regularly come with fears about possible violence, activist and politician Boniface Mwangi tweeted that Trump’s presidency should be a warning to the world: “It will take longer than Trump’s lifetime for America to heal and recover from what happened this past four years.”

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Associated Press journalists Anita Snow in Phoenix; Jocelyn Noveck, Marjorie Miller, David Caruso, Tali Arbel, Christina Paciolla in New York City; Bill Barrow and R.J. Rico in Atlanta; Daisy Nguyen in San Francisco; Doug Glass in Minneapolis; Bobby Caina Calvan in Tallahassee, Florida; Corey Williams in Detroit; Mike Balsamo in Washington; Terry Spencer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Samy Magdy in Cairo; Danica Coto in Puerto Rico; Stephen Groves in Volga, South Dakota; Cara Anna in Nairobi, Kenya and Pan Pylas in Ballina, Ireland. Galofaro reported from Louisville, Kentucky.

Kamala Harris made history Saturday as the first Black woman elected as vice president of the United States, shattering barriers that have kept men — almost all of them white — entrenched at the highest levels of American politics for more than two centuries.

The 56-year-old California senator, also the first person of South Asian descent elected to the vice presidency, represents the multiculturalism that defines America but is largely absent from Washington’s power centers. Her Black identity has allowed her to speak in personal terms in a year of reckoning over police brutality and systemic racism. As the highest-ranking woman ever elected in American government, her victory gives hope to women who were devastated by Hillary Clinton’s defeat four years ago.

Harris has been a rising star in Democratic politics for much of the last two decades, serving as San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general before becoming a U.S. senator. After Harris ended her own 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, Joe Biden tapped her as his running mate. They will be sworn in as president and vice president on Jan. 20.

Biden’s running mate selection carried added significance because he will be the oldest president ever inaugurated, at 78, and hasn’t committed to seeking a second term in 2024.

Harris often framed her candidacy as part of the legacy — often undervalued — of pioneering Black women who came before her, including educator Mary McLeod Bethune, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black candidate to seek a major party’s presidential nomination, in 1972.

“We’re not often taught their stories,” Harris said in August as she accepted her party’s vice presidential nomination. “But as Americans, we all stand on their shoulders.”

That history was on Sara Twyman’s mind recently as she watched Harris campaign in Las Vegas and wore a sweatshirt featuring the senator’s name alongside Chisholm.

“It’s high time that a woman gets to the highest levels of our government,” said Twyman, who is 35 and Black.

Despite the excitement surrounding Harris, she and Biden face steep challenges, including deepening racial tensions in the U.S. in the wake of a pandemic that has taken a disproportionate toll on people of color and a series of police killings of Black Americans. Harris’ past work as a prosecutor has prompted skepticism among progressives and young voters who are looking to her to back sweeping institutional change over incremental reforms in policing, drug policy and more.

Jessica Byrd, who leads the Movement for Black Lives’ Electoral Justice Project and The Frontline, a multiracial coalition effort to galvanize voters, said she plans to engage in the rigorous organizing work needed to push Harris and Biden toward more progressive policies.

“I deeply believe in the power of Black women’s leadership, even when all of our politics don’t align,” Byrd said. “I want us to be committed to the idea that representation is exciting and it’s worthy of celebration and also that we have millions of Black women who deserve a fair shot.”

Harris is the second Black woman elected to the Senate. Her colleague, Sen. Cory Booker, who is also Black, said her very presence makes the institution “more accessible to more people” and suggested she would accomplish the same with the vice presidency.

Harris was born in 1964 to two parents active in the civil rights movement. Shyamala Gopalan, from India, and Donald Harris, from Jamaica, met at the University of California, Berkeley, then a hotbed of 1960s activism. They divorced when Harris and her sister were girls, and Harris was raised by her late mother, whom she considers the most important influence in her life.

Kamala is Sanskrit for “lotus flower,” and Harris gave nods to her Indian heritage throughout the campaign, including with a callout to her “

The mocking of her name by Republicans, including Trump, was just one of the attacks Harris faced. Trump and his allies sought to brand her as radical and a socialist despite her more centrist record, an effort aimed at making people uncomfortable about the prospect of a Black woman in leadership. She was the target of online disinformation laced with racism and sexism about her qualifications to serve as president.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of Washington said Harris’ power comes not just from her life experience but also from the people she already represents. California is the nation’s most populous and one of its most diverse states; nearly 40% of people are Latino and 15% are Asian. In Congress, Harris and Jayapal have teamed up on bills to ensure legal representation for Muslims targeted by Trump’s 2017 travel ban and to extend rights to domestic workers.

“That’s the kind of policy that also happens when you have voices like ours at the table,” said Jayapal, who in 2016 was the first South Asian woman elected to the U.S. House. Harris won election to the Senate that same year.

Harris’ mother raised her daughters with the understanding the world would see them as Black women, Harris has said, and that is how she describes herself today.

She attended Howard University, one of the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities, and pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s first sorority created by and for Black women. She campaigned regularly at HBCUs and tried to address the concerns of young Black men and women eager for strong efforts to dismantle systemic racism.

Her victory could usher more Black women and people of color into politics.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who considers Harris a mentor, views Harris’ success through the lens of her own identity as the granddaughter of a sharecropper.

“African Americans are not far removed from slavery and the horrors of racism in this country, and we’re still feeling the impacts of that with how we’re treated and what’s happening around this racial uprising,” she said. Harris’ candidacy “instills a lot of pride and a lot of hope and a lot of excitement in what is possible.”

Harris is married to a Jewish man, Doug Emhoff, whose children from a previous marriage call her “Momala.” The excitement about her candidacy extends to women across races.

Friends Sarah Lane and Kelli Hodge, each with three daughters, brought all six girls to a Harris rally in Phoenix in the race’s closing days. “This car is full of little girls who dream big. Go Kamala!” read a sign taped on the car’s trunk.

Lane, a 41-year-old attorney who is of Hispanic and Asian heritage, volunteered for Biden and Harris, her first time ever working for a political campaign. Asked why she brought her daughters, ages 6, 9 and 11, to see Harris, she answered, “I want my girls to see what women can do.”

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Associated Press writer Kat Stafford in Detroit contributed to this report.