When 93-year-old historian John Hope Franklin was growing up in Oklahoma, he and his mother would joke that he was going to be the first "Negro" president of the United States.

"Just the words were so far fetched, so incredible ... "

Sen. Barack Obama's historic achievement as presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic Party has given African-Americans who thought they would never see such a day, and those who toiled in the fields of civil rights in hopes that they would, a sense of pride and jubilation.

"It's amazing, remarkable," Mr. Franklin, a professor emeritus of history at Duke University, said in an online interview with the school. "It's an indication of the willingness as well as the ability of this country to turn a full significant corner toward full political equality. I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime."

Mr. Obama became on Tuesday the first African-American to lead a major U.S. political party as its presidential nominee after a long and sometimes bitter battle against former first lady and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Yesterday, in an attempt to repair some of the rifts and bring about party unity, some of Mrs. Clinton's closest supporters -- nearly two dozen House Democrats from her home state -- switched their endorsements to Mr. Obama.

"It's an enormous honor ... It's very humbling," Mr. Obama said of his achievement. "When you think about all the people who had knocked down barriers for me to walk through this one; and the challenges they went through were so much more difficult, so much more severe; and the risks they took were so much greater."

Pittsburgh civil rights stalwart Alma Speed Fox, who has spent her life working for social justice, is one of those people.

"The way things are going and as racist as some parts of our country is, it seemed like an impossibility," she said. "It's only a few years that we have had the privilege of voting."

Juanita Abernathy, a member of the civil rights movement and wife of civil rights icon Dr. Ralph Abernathy, said she knew that an African-American would achieve such a milestone, but she prayed she would live long enough to see it.

"Actually, that was what the movement was about," she said. "We laid our lives on the line for this kind of thing to happen one day."

Sala Udin, CEO of the Coro Leadership Center who participated in the Freedom Rides of the 1960s, said he recalled that time as he watched Mr. Obama deliver his speech Tuesday night.

"My chest burst with pride. My mind went back to my days as a Freedom Rider and all of the young people who left the north and the west and the east to go to the south to risk their lives in order to fight for the right of people of African descent to be able to vote."

The progress of African-Americans in the political arena has been grindingly slow but steady since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with many achieving firsts in elected positions at the local, state and national levels.

In 1989, L. Douglas Wilder became the first African-American to be elected governor, serving from 1990 to 1994. He sought a Democratic nomination for president in 1991 but dropped out of the race when he failed to raise enough money.

"When L. Douglas Wilder won that was huge news, that was historical," said Brian Balogh, an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and a senior scholar at its Miller Center of Public Affairs.

The significance of Mr. Obama's presumptive nomination is certainly not lost on the baby boom generation, who in their youth would have found it hard to fathom the notion of an African-American president, he said.

It is even more astounding because 150 years ago, one half of the nation fought the other half of the nation in defense of slavery.

Mr. Balogh said one of the important things the Chicago senator did is "naturalize" race.

"That is to say that [race] is not the only feature that people are talking about.

"A lot of people will say this is just symbolic," Mr. Balogh said, "but the presidency of the United States is an awfully important symbol."

For some, however, it is more than a symbol.

Don Patterson, a 48-year-old African-American from Penn Hills, recounts a recent conversation with his 9-year-old son, Dante.

"Daddy, could I be president?" his son asked.

He told his son he could if he applied himself.

"But I wouldn't have said that three years ago," he said. "I probably would have said, 'I don't know son, maybe not in our lifetime.'"

However, Mr. Patterson said, in addition to giving rise to the possibility of what his son can achieve, Mr. Obama's candidacy has sparked the audacity of hope in youngsters of all races. "When I hear young people, white and black talking about politics, and they're passionate, that's incredible."