The stares were as cold as the temperature that day in November of 1964 when Willar Hightower walked into a Trenton, S.C., polling place to vote for the first time ever.

The eight men who stood or sat along a wall, all white, got very quiet as they eyed the young black man entering the room. Mr. Hightower, who had been recently commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army but was in graduate school on a special deferment, sensed they didn't want him there.

But he voted anyway in that presidential election. And it felt good.

"While I was in that wait stage to go into the Army to defend my country, I'm getting a cold feeling walking down to vote," said the longtime Aiken County Council member. "But, that was all right. When I came out, I just felt real good that I could vote, and I was not afraid to walk down that path while some people were there that I thought did not want me to vote."

The ascension of Barack Obama as the Democratic Party's presumptive presidential nominee is almost something unimaginable for many black Americans who lived through an era when their right to vote was anything but guaranteed. When the U.S. senator from Illinois claimed the nomination in his Tuesday night speech, the shivers it sent down their spines were real.

"Maybe if I lived, if I got into my late 90s, ... there might be a possibility of a serious candidate, but now it is absolutely within the realm of possibility for this year," said Mallory Millender, a Paine College professor and community activist about Mr. Obama's chances of winning the presidency. "And in America, for me, that is astounding."

Appreciating fully what Mr. Obama's candidacy means, Dr. Millender said, likely requires having lived through a time when skin color truly influenced day-to-day life in America, particularly in the South. Mr. Hightower recalls the exact moment when he became aware of that fact.

His mother had taken him and his sisters to downtown Augusta to shop at the former J.B. White department store on Broad Street. Mr. Hightower, who said he was about 9 or 10 at the time, learned later that his mother shopped there because she was treated better than at other stores. During the shopping trip, he became thirsty and spotted a nearby water fountain. As he headed to the fountain, his mother came running, grabbed him by the arm, pointed to another fountain, saying, "C'mon. We can drink over here."

When he questioned why, she told him: "That's white water."

During the ride home, she explained things to him.

"And that was my first realization as a young man, as a young boy, that there was a difference," he said. "I hadn't noticed that I lived in a segregated community. I just lived in a community."

Healing some of those racial wounds is something some see as one of the possible benefits of Mr. Obama's historic candidacy. Grady Abrams, who was one of the first blacks to be elected to Augusta city government as a councilman in the 1970s, said Mr. Obama's very real chance to be president makes real the American ideal as a land of opportunity.

"I was proud of the fact that this country had risen to the point where it could support an Afro-American to run for the highest office in this country," he said. "It just made me proud of this country, not for the first time as Michelle Obama said, but it made me more proud of this country because this was the last frontier that I see blocking America from taking its rightful place in the world as being a world leader."

But that pride comes tinged with a sense of concern over Mr. Obama's safety. Today marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a charismatic political leader with whom Mr. Obama has often been compared. For those who lived through the turbulent 1960s when this fate befell political and civil rights icons such as John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr., the fear is just below the surface.

"It's in the back (of your mind). It's there. We would be crazy not to consider it," said James Kendrick, an Augusta businessman and civic leader. "But I do think this, for what he brings to the table, I, too, think it's worth it. Not that I would like to trade his life for it. But he is willing to do it, and I am anxious to see him serve. I believe that he will serve in a unique position for the entire American community, not just the African-American community."