WASHINGTON — Less than five miles from the White House, separated by a river and so much history, people spoke of popping champagne, of winning the lottery. They remembered those who died before witnessing this day, and they stored away "I Voted" stickers as if they were precious heirlooms.

The often forgotten neighborhood of Anacostia spoke of history — slavery and separate water fountains. They reached in vain for adjectives that were big enough — excited, ecstatic, astonishing. Some people just leaned out of car windows and shouted: "Obamaaaaaa!"

"What did Martin Luther King say? We're going to the mountaintop? That's how I feel," said Delores Oliver, standing in the parking lot of the hilltop Washington View Apartments, with the famous part of Washington spread out in the distance below.

Millions of voters who swamped churches and schools and community centers Tuesday paused to consider what generations before had been brutalized for, died for and only dreamed of: The chance to vote a black man into the White House.

In the cities that have written the long, tortured history of race in America — places where slaves were bought and sold, where a Declaration of Independence prematurely called "all men" equal, where black schoolchildren faced segregationist mobs — voters black and white spoke of joy, pride and utter disbelief.

"Look where black people came from," said Dasmin Holloway, a black college student, not far from where nine students faced down angry crowds and the governor of Arkansas in 1959 to integrate Central High School in Little Rock.

"We started off as slaves," Holloway said after voting for Obama. "Now look."

Now look. Centuries after a nation was founded on freedom but enslaved its own, 143 years after race tore it in half, 45 years after King dreamed and 40 after he died, Americans had the opportunity to elect the son of a Kenyan and a Kansan as leader of the free world.

George Palmer, a 41-year-old computer analyst, considered the weight of it as he waited with his wife, Joetta, and their 5-year-old twins, Justin and Jasmine, to vote for Obama.

They were in line at Burke High School in Charleston, S.C., next to the Citadel military academy, whose cadets fired on a Union steamer en route to Fort Sumter on Jan. 9, 1861. They were not far from where hundreds of thousands of slaves had been traded.

Palmer's thoughts were on more recent memories.

"When I was a kid and my mom told me I could be president, I didn't believe it," said Palmer, who is black. "But if he wins today, when I tell my son, 'Hey, you could be president one day,' he will believe it."