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When Rachel Whitfield was a teenager, 60 years ago, she saw a classmate walking on the road, rather than on the grass beside the road where she was supposed to walk, because she was black.

“People told her to get off the road, but she wouldn't, so they called a slapper,” she remembers. A policeman arrived, and slapped the young girl around, to remind her of her place.

Almost two-thirds of a century later, Ms. Whitfield, 76, believes “there's been a lot of changes. But the prejudice and whatnot, it lingers on.”

Prejudice lingers on, and poverty and resentment in this small town in one of the poorest parts of America. And that is why, for so many black Americans, Barack Obama is not simply a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, but the incarnation of a prophesy.

“How can I say it?” Levone Graves, 61, searches for the words. “It's a joy. It's a great hope. It's Martin's dream come alive.”

Martin Luther King's dream lives. But the dream is unlikely to be fulfilled, simply because Mr. Obama cannot square the circle of appealing to race and transcending it.

Mr. Obama is expected to win the South Carolina Democratic primary today. Up to half of the voters are expected to be black, and black voters are believed to favour Mr. Obama over New York Senator Hillary Clinton two or more to one.

But white voters appear to favour Ms. Clinton, and Latino voters and women voters, too. That is why Ms. Clinton won the New Hampshire and Nevada contests. It is why she still holds a lead, albeit steadily diminishing, in the national polls. And it is why she must still be favoured to win the greater number of delegates when 22 states hold Democratic primaries and caucuses on Feb. 5.

Yet Dillon can still hope, even though hope is such a scarce resource.

The town, population 6,000 and dropping fast, is in the heart of the Pee Dee, a collection of counties in northeastern Carolina named after a nearby river.

The upper Pee Dee, especially, is in desperate straits. The cotton and tobacco farms are in decline, and the textile mills closed when the jobs went offshore.

The population is 70 per cent black, 30 per cent white and 100 per cent worried. There are some nice parts of town – stately homes with wide verandahs and broad lawns where the white folk live, or used to – and many streets filled with tiny, decrepit shacks where the blacks eke out some sort of life.

“It's a tough life here,” Amanda Burnette acknowledges. She is the principal of J.V. Martin Junior High School, where 88 per cent of the students qualify for subsidized meals, which is a standard definition of poverty. Fifty-five per cent of students never complete high school. Half of the students come from single-parent homes.

J.V. Martin is notorious. Parts of the school are more than 100 years old. The roof leaks, the wiring is faulty and there is neither heat nor air conditioning in much of the building.

Mr. Obama has made the “corridor of shame” – the belt of run-down schools in impoverished communities that border Interstate 95 in eastern South Carolina – a national crusade.

He was in Dillon, again, Wednesday night, speaking before a crowd of 600 or more wildly enthusiastic supporters, almost all of them black.

“If we can spend $9-billion a month in Iraq, we can spend a few million dollars for that school at J.V. Martin, so our children can succeed,” he told them.

“You are our hope,” someone shouted out, as he talked.

He is Joan Jones's hope. At her hair salon, the next day, she explained why there is a Barack Obama sign on the door.

“I believe that he will bring about change,” she says, “a change for the world,” and “a big change for Dillon.”

She has no time for those who say not yet, he's not ready, America's not ready.

“Why not?” she retorts. “When are we going to be ready, if we're not ready now? What's the difference between you and me, except our colour? We live, and one day we're going to die. And we're going to be judged.”

And yet the harsh irony of politics is that the more hope Barack Obama gives to people like Joan Jones, the more he damages his chances of winning the nomination.

At the very heart of Mr. Obama's appeal, especially for liberal, affluent white voters, is that he does not come out of the angry black South, as Rev. Jesse Jackson did. (A South Carolina native, he won the state in both his 1984 and 1988 bids for the Democratic presidential nomination.) Mr. Obama was raised in Indonesia and Hawaii; his mother was white and his father Kenyan.

Until a month or so ago, a majority of black voters supported Ms. Clinton, whose husband remains very popular among blacks. Mr. Obama has had to work hard to convince them that he is their candidate, that he is one of them, as his address in Dillon subtly stressed.

Talking of the Washingtonian doublespeak he accuses both the Republican administration and Ms. Clinton of practising, he protested: “That ain't right.”

Then he chuckled. “There are some things that are not right. And then there are some things that just ain't right. And that ain't right.”

This from the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

And yet even as Mr. Obama asserts in South Carolina that he is, indeed, black enough, he risks alienating the other parts of the broad coalition he must forge to win the nomination.

A McClatchy news service poll released Thursday revealed that Mr. Obama's support among white voters in South Carolina had fallen to 10 per cent from 20 per cent. But the poll also showed that he enjoyed the support of 66 per cent of black men and 55 per cent of black women.

That support, to the extent it is mirrored nationwide, could be fatal for Mr. Obama's campaign, especially if it also reinforces the growing preferences of Latino voters for Ms. Clinton over Mr. Obama.

That is tragic. The great appeal of Mr. Obama's campaign is that it seeks to surmount race and partisanship. Yet it is being compromised by the very race-identity politics it hopes to overcome.

Both Hillary Clinton and former North Carolina senator John Edwards, who hails from South Carolina, have made their obligatory pitches along the corridor of shame. But it is only Mr. Obama who has bound himself and his fate to these people. If he fails, Dillon will disappear again from the political conscience of America, and its people will be left to their fate.

It is why so many here embrace Mr. Obama as though their life depended on it, which it may.

“For once, a man comes along who wants to emphasize change, which is what the country needs, which is the voice of the people,” proclaims Chuck Smith, 44 and black, who owns several businesses on Main Street.

“He's not just going to work on behalf of us. He's bringing in the people who fear us and who we sometimes fear.

“It is time to get away from the politics of fear,” Mr. Smith urges, passionately. And Mr. Obama, he believes, could take the fear away.

“He is the very ideal of change.”

But change does not come easy, in the Pee Dee or anywhere else.