Obama edged Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, by 13,692 votes in North Carolina, among more than 4.2 million cast. Bush drew 435,317 more votes than Kerry four years earlier, among almost 3.5 million total cast.

Such a change may explain why Michael Trobich, a white middle-school student in Charlotte, N.C., feels that the history books he reads are out of touch with the world in which he's growing up.

"Just dividing the U.S. into sections is kind of unfair," Michael said. "There are people in each section who have different beliefs than most people think they would."

Yet, even in a favorable election year for Democrats, Obama fared worse than Kerry and Gore had fared in Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Oklahoma and West Virginia (the U.S. Census Bureau places 16 states in the South, including Oklahoma and West Virginia).

Louisiana is particularly puzzling. Although one in three residents is black, Obama drew less than 40 percent of the statewide vote — a smaller share than Kerry's 42.2 percent in 2004 or Gore's 44.9 percent in 2000.

With 95 percent of blacks nationwide backing Obama — and blacks voting in proportionately larger numbers — you don't need a calculator to know that few white Louisianans voted for Obama, likely less than 10 percent.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, by contrast, was re-elected with 52.1 percent of the vote. The inescapable conclusion is that almost a quarter of those who voted for Landrieu, virtually all of them white, didn't vote for Obama.

In the South as a whole, Obama got 48.7 percent of the vote. That's 4.2 points fewer than his national total of 52.9 percent, but slightly better than the region's results for Kerry (48.3 percent) or Gore (48.4 percent).

A black presidential candidate outperforming white ones in the South amazes Charlotte Wooten, a native of Birmingham, Ala., where her younger sister helped integrate a Catholic high school.

When Wooten moved to Raleigh, N.C., in the 1960s to attend graduate school at North Carolina State University, not everyone welcomed her.

Some white friends who had her over for brunch after church were kicked out of their apartment by their landlord.

Wooten, a retired software services manager, volunteered for Obama last year, knocking on doors in largely white, Republican neighborhoods.

"I saw 70-year-old white ladies in a team room with Obama stickers on," Wooten said. "To see that now was so amazing for North Carolina."

For many African-Americans from the South, the region remains a place of dichotomy.

It's a land steeped in bloody racial history.

It's also a place of rebirth and opportunity where, thanks to the civil rights movement, blacks now dominate local governments from Birmingham to Memphis, Tenn.

In outposts like Greensboro, Ga., Obama's election means the world to rural folks who've fought battles against racial injustice.

Willie Adams, a local chicken farmer, is among thousands of Southern black farmers who were denied federal agriculture loans, and whose protests were ignored until they filed a lawsuit that took a decade for them to win.

"We're black farmers trying to hold onto the land," Adams said. "Obama understands the everyday common people."

Obama's election also resonates in the Upstate of South Carolina, one of the most conservative corners of the country.

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