WASHINGTON — Keylon Simpkins, cooking catfish and country-fried steak at Ajax Diner in Oxford, Miss., said he really won't believe the United States has its first black president until Barack Obama takes the oath of office.

Simpkins, a 26-year-old African-American, graduated in 2007 with a political science degree from Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, just down the road from the popular eatery.

In late September 1962, President John F. Kennedy sent thousands of federal troops to Oxford to quell riots that killed two people and injured 300 when James Meredith attempted to register as the university's first black student.

"To say that we went from having the first African-American at Ole Miss just 40-some years ago to now having the first African-American president — that's one of those things . . . " Simpkins' voice caught for a moment ". . . I don't know how to describe it. I know it happened, but I'm still waiting on the inauguration for it to sink in. It's like a shining moment in history."

Obama's election was a historic event for all Americans, and for millions around the globe.

Yet, the inauguration of a Hawaiian native with a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya has special significance in the South, the center of American slavery for more than two centuries and still the home of more than half the nation's African-Americans.

Joel Williamson, a University of North Carolina historian who's written extensively about race relations in the South, said Obama's rise to power could be a turning point.

"Marvelously, we have taken a leap forward against racism in this election, and in taking that leap forward, we are dragging forward a centuries-old element in our culture that is racist," he said.

Williamson, a white, 79-year-old native South Carolinian, said the region has changed dramatically in the decades since police clubbed civil rights marchers, restaurants refused to serve blacks and nonwhite travelers often had nowhere to sleep.

Many young Southerners, black and white, have moved beyond their parents' and grandparents' struggles, Williamson said, yet pockets of racism and conflict persist.

"Obama's election in many parts of the South is just a disaster because too many Southerners still believe that black people are inferior to white people," he said.

In Longview, Texas, not far from the Louisiana border, Debbie Moniz often got a chilly reception when she told folks that she planned to vote for Obama.

"There's a lot of people here that are very prejudiced against black people," said Moniz, a disabled cashier. "I tell them off. I just say, 'They bleed the same color we do.'"

It's hard to draw firm conclusions from the election results about the progress of race relations in the South.

Even though the South remains the Republicans' power base, Obama carried Virginia, North Carolina and Florida — three populous Southern states that hadn't together backed a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

In North Carolina, where blacks make up 21.9 percent of the population, Obama drew 50 percent of the vote — almost 7 points better than the showings of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry in 2004 and former Vice President Al Gore, who's from neighboring Tennessee, in 2000.

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