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A few hours before the polls closed in North Carolina, I got a phone call from a childhood friend who lives in our native state of Alabama.

She had been going door-to-door all day, urging people to vote for Barack Obama and offering them rides to the polls. She knew Obama's chances of winning in rock-ribbed conservative Alabama were next to nil, but she would try to turn voters around.

It was an historic day, and she began reminiscing about our childhoods in the segregated South.

"I wish Ellen had lived long enough to see this day," she said in a voice tinged with regret. "She wouldn't have believed it."

Ellen was her family's cook and cleaning woman who also took care of my friend and her sister. Ellen's life resembled that of millions of black people living in the Deep South back then.

She always went to the back door of white people's houses, never through the front door. She often wore hand-me-down clothes from white people. Her education was skimpy from inferior schooling. Her modest house was in the "colored section" of town.

If my friend's mother gave her a ride home after work, Ellen sat alone in the back seat of the car. Whites and blacks didn't sit beside each other back then.

On several occasions my friend's mother would ask Ellen to sit beside her on the front seat. Ellen politely declined. She didn't want white passers-by to stare at her.

Ellen "knew her place." She dutifully obeyed the signs in public places that said "Colored" and "White." And the old rules were hard to forget years later when the South was desegregated.

Ellen seldom went to the "picture show," but one afternoon my friend, then an adult, took her to the movies. Ellen was old and no longer could work. Ellen still headed for the balcony. She felt uncomfortable sitting downstairs in the former "white section."

If Ellen, who died in the 1980s, had been told back then that a 47-year-old man named Barack Obama, who had a white mother and a black father, who attended school in Indonesia but grew up in Hawaii, who graduated from Columbia University and Harvard University, would be elected the 44th president of the United States, she would have been dismayed.

And frankly, so would millions of white Southerners of that era when Gov. George Wallace "stood in the school house door," when white Freedom Riders were beaten up by white racists, when Bull Connor ordered the Birmingham police to turn powerful water hoses on black people trying to peacefully demonstrate for integration.

As my friend reminisced about those terrible times in Alabama, her voice cracked with emotion. Call it "white Southern guilt" or whatever you wish, but we Southerners with memories of those terrible times got moist-eyed along with African Americans on election night.

But has race finally been consigned to oblivion? Post-election surveys are encouraging about changing attitudes among white voters. Many analysts predicted voters would tell pollsters that race would not be a factor but vote otherwise. Post-election surveys show that didn't happen to a large extent. Obama got 52 percent of the vote nationwide and 43 percent of the white vote.

Exit polls revealed that only 19 percent of white voters said race was a factor for them. Earlier polls, including a CNN poll several months ago, found that nearly 40 percent said race would play at least a small role in their voting.

It remains to be seen if this is a long-term trend about racial attitudes. Yet Obama's victory puts to rest the notion that an African American cannot be elected president of the United States.

America has turned a page in history, and it sent a powerful message about our values as a people. If only the Ellens who once sat in the back of the bus had lived to see it.

Finally this: John McCain's concession speech on election night was a model of eloquence, graciousness and wisdom. He deserves a salute.

Rosemary Roberts writes a Friday column. E-mail: rmroberts@triad.rr.com.