Wendell — To call last week’s election historic would almost be an understatement. Voters elected the first black U.S. president and the first woman as governor of North Carolina.

Local residents watched last week’s election results come in with a clear sense of the history that was being made in front of them.

Mary Perry, a leader of the NAACP from Wendell, said she never thought she’d see a black person elected to the nation’s highest office.

“I stayed up until two in the morning and said ‘Hallelujah, thank you, Jesus,’” Perry said.

She said she expected the race barrier to be broken one day, but she thought it would be a sight for her grandchildren to see.

She credited Obama’s ability to mobilize young people as a major factor in his win over Republican John McCain.

“The apathy of our young people was worrying me. One of the reasons they were active this time was that they saw some hope. They have always thought they didn’t have a chance to make a difference, but this time they saw that they could,” Perry said. Knightdale Mayor Russell Killen said Obama was able to overcome issues of race to claim last week’s win.

“What I thought was that everybody is just ready for a change in leadership. People are willing to unite behind somebody new. People are not as worried about party or ideology as we are about somebody who wants to come in and fix the problems we have,” Killen said.

Killen agreed with Perry on the role of young people in Obama’s election win, but he says there was more to it than simply mobilizing volunteers.

“I don’t think the younger generation in the U.S. views race as an issue. They weren’t voting for him because he was African-American or because he was a Democrat,” Killen said.

Wendell Pastor James Lee, who won election himself as a black candidate for town council in the 1970s, called the outcome of the presidential election a sign that Americans are becoming more diverse.

“We cannot be the people we ought to be until we realize all the potential we have. We can’t just say that one group gets to have all the power all the time,” Lee said. Lee called Obama more than just a politician.

“I told my wife I think he’s a statesman, not a politician. If he stays on that course, I think we’ll be OK,” Lee said.

Linda Coleman, a member of the state House of Representatives from Knightdale who won her own re-election last week, also described the outcome of the election as historic.

“Chills just went through me. It’s almost indescribable. You know you’re out there working for this kind of thing, but then to see it happen is just the most amazing thing,” Coleman said.

Perdue, though her ascension to the governor’s mansion was not as dramatic as Obama’s rise to the White House, still managed to break through a glass ceiling of her own.

“It’s a real change in the good old boy status of government,” Perry said. “They see that women can do the job as well as a man if they will just give us a chance.”

Killen said Perdue’s rise marks less of a change in status than Obama’s because Perdue is a long-standing member of the political class in Raleigh.

“Women have taken a larger and larger role in government, and I think this was a much more obvious progression,” Killen said.

But he pointed out that Perdue’s biggest challenge will be to carry on a reformer’s image “She’s going to have to figure out how to break away from the people that she’s been working with for a long time if she wants to do that,” Killen said.

Obama’s coattails were long and U.S. Senate candidate Kay Hagan defeated incumbent Republican Elizabeth Dole, wresting control of a U.S. Senate seat that had been in Republican hands for 36 years.

Democrats also won at the state and local level. State Auditor Les Merritt, a Republican from Zebulon, lost his bid for re-election to Democrat Beth Wood.

In races for county commissioner, incumbent Democrats Harold Webb and Betty Lou Ward fended off challenges, while Democrat Stan Norwalk upended Republican incumbent Kenn Gardner.

Coleman, who is also a Democrat, says she hopes the changes in Congress will give Obama a mandate to make changes in government policy that will help states like North Carolina.

“I hope we’ll see a shift in policies. But people shouldn’t expect things to get better overnight. We didn’t get into this overnight and we won’t be able to change it that quickly either.”