Ora Williams has had the right to vote for 43 years, but it is only now, aged 92, that the great-grandmother from Walton County, Georgia, has chosen to exercise it.

“I’ve been watching him on the television, that Barack Obama, and I said that this time I am going to get there and vote. I never voted before, I never wanted to vote. But I seen all the fuss about voting on the TV,” she said.

Sitting on her bed in the clapboard home where she has lived for more than 50 years, Mrs Williams, who has difficulty hearing and wears a Barack Obama badge pinned to her blue sweatshirt, said: “I never thought I would see a black president, but he’s going to do it.”

Having told her granddaughter, Glynda, a Baptist church worker, of her intention to help Mr Obama to become America’s 44th president, she had, suddenly after four decades, become frustrated about the delay caused by having to fill out a form to register.

In her dark home, dotted with photographs of relatives – some of whom died decades ago, and one of Marcus, her 22-year-old great-grandson who left to serve in Iraq this week, Mrs Williams reflected that her journey had been a long one. But it was a journey shared with many thousands of other poor blacks who waited yesterday for hours in the heat outside Baptist churches and school gyms to vote for a presidential candidate who finally spoke to them. Near by stands the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Sweet Auburn, where Martin Luther King used to preach and where he is now buried.

It is estimated that as many as 70 per cent of voting-age African-Americans cast their ballots yesterday, which would far exceed the 56 per cent who voted in 2004 and break the record for black participation set in the 1968 presidential election.

Mrs Williams has trouble remembering what year she was born and giggles at her brief lapse of memory. But as she recounts her past, chronicled in the photographs of Georgia dances and wedding pictures, it is unsurprising that she feels little affinity with John McCain, whose Republican Party has held the state on and off for more than 40 years.

Born in the heart of the deep South to black farm labourers, she picked cotton as a child with her only sibling, a brother, now long dead. In 1931, at the height of the Depression and aged 15, she left for the town of Decatur, which she says was then mainly “cow pasture”, and got married at home.

Mrs Williams is excited by the prospect of an Obama win and is quietly sanguine about the years of segregation and the undercurrent of racial violence that existed until the late 1980s.

Racial segregation – which made it illegal for African-Americans to share housing areas, transport, or employment – persisted through the 1950s and 1960s and only drew to a close after violent civil rights demonstrations at the end of that decade, when Mrs Williams was already in her sixties.

As a hairdresser and beautician practising in Georgia, she dressed only black women’s hair. “We had problems going into stores and restaurants and cafés,” Mrs Williams recalled. “On the bus we had to ride at the back, we weren’t allowed to sit up front. You just did whatever you were told,” she says.

While black voters in Georgia can indeed now speak their mind, they have other worries. Many are trapped in the spiral of unemployment across the state and are struggling to keep pace with food prices and home repossessions. Many homes in Mrs Williams’s street sport wooden posts in their front yards urging supporters to vote early for Obama, but a number of other properties are boarded up.

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