Ina Wilson, 73, remembers how her parents — poor blacks in small-town Mississippi — were denied the vote. She remembers the brutality of the civil rights era, Martin Luther King’s assassination, a lifetime of discrimination against African-Americans.

So on Tuesday night, as she sat in the Monumental Baptist Church on the South Side of Chicago waiting for the presidential debate, she could scarcely contain her excitement at the prospect of a black man, Barack Obama, winning the White House. “It would be the most historical moment of my life. It would be amazing,” she said. It would be an inspiration to her four children and eight grandchildren, of whom all that are old enough will definitely vote on November 4.

That same sense of anticipation is now coursing through the South Side ghettos in whose bleak housing projects Mr Obama began his political career as a community organiser — ghettos inhabited by descendants of the fugitive slaves who arrived on the underground railway in the 19th century, and of the hundreds of thousands of poor Southern blacks who migrated north in search of jobs between 1910 and 1960.

“Obama is like the Martin Luther King of my day,” said Latisha Bolden, 36, a trainee nurse shopping in a dollar store on a street of boarded-up houses and derelict lots in a neighbourhood called Bronzeville. “He’s motivating young African-Americans to feel they can achieve their goals and overcome barriers and do just about anything.”

Rob Williams, 38, an hotel security officer, said: “I’m ecstatic. He’s telling our youth that you don’t have to stop at a certain level, that you can shoot for the stars. You may not attain them but you can come pretty close.”

Tiffany Shanell Gates, 28, who cuts hair in a spartan barber’s shop on 47th Street, exclaimed: “For ever they’ve said, ‘You’ll never see a black president’, but it’s happening right now, today, and if he makes it — oh my God, I hope my heart doesn’t stop.”

No South Sider approached by The Times felt that Mr Obama was anything but a “brother”, though he has a white mother, was raised in Hawaii and Jakarta, educated at Harvard and lives in an affluent, multiracial enclave called Hyde Park that is well insulated from the deprivation all around it.

Almost everyone in a traditionally apathetic electorate said that they had registered to vote and would cast their ballot. In South Side, as in other black areas, a record turnout is expected.

But the corollary of all this hope is a widely held fear that this greatest of prizes will be snatched away by the machinations of the white Establishment, by assassination or by white voters who — whatever they tell pollsters — will simply refuse to tick the box for a black man.

“When it actually comes down to it and people see this black man is going to be President of the United States — I don’t think [white voters are going to be able to deal with that,” an African-American photographer, who refused to give his name, said.

“Racism is alive and well,” agreed a middle-aged black woman at the Baptist church, who also asked not to be named.

“I don’t think it [an Obama presidency] is going to happen,” Ms Gates, the hairdresser, said. “The Republicans are not going to let that happen in any circumstances . . . They can rig votes. They could try to kill him.”

That fear of assassination was fuelled this week when a rally in Florida was marred by shouts of “kill him” after Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running-mate, criticised Mr Obama.

“In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that if he wins the powers-that-be will allow him to make it to office. I don’t believe Americans are ready for a black president . . . They will juice up some idiot or psychopath to do something to him,” said Abdul Bari, 39, a Muslim, who still finds it impossible to envisage a man named Barack Hussein Obama taking the oath of office.

In the introverted, paranoid world of the ghetto even wilder conspiracy theories are circulating. One is that the economic meltdown has been engineered to keep Mr Obama out of the Oval Office. “They are trying to pull this national disaster thing. It’s a trick to keep Bush in power,” declared Omarr Roland Phillips, 35, as he had his head shaved in the 47th Street barber’s shop.

Another customer, Theon Jones, 26, said that the meltdown was brought about to ensure that an Obama presidency would be doomed to failure: “They are trying to mess up the economy before he gets in.”

An Obama victory would thrill 40 million black Americans but the converse is also true. Their hopes have been raised so high that his defeat — and the racist vote is real — could have dire consequences. Most South Siders told The Times that they would be extremely disappointed but would take solace from the fact that a black man had come so close.

Others were less sanguine. “It would be a slap in the face for the black community,” the owner of a small business said. “Things would go up in smoke.”

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