WEST COLUMBIA, S.C. -- When Hillary Rodham Clinton started running for president, Wanjulia Ezekiel was thrilled.
"I was looking forward to the advancement of a female," she said.
But Sen. Barack Obama is getting her vote in this week's Democratic presidential primary in South Carolina.
"He speaks to the possibility that I dreamed about as a child," explained the 40-year- old civil engineer from Columbia, the state capital.
With Democrats on track to select either the party's first female or black presidential nominee, polls have suggested that black women such as Ezekiel are torn by conflicting loyalties to race and gender.
In interviews, some black voters have said that they were supporting the New York senator because they did not believe that Obama could get elected amid lingering racism in America.
But as the Democratic contest narrows to a two-person race, and Obama showed that he could win white votes in Iowa and New Hampshire, voters are swinging behind him in impressive numbers.
"I understand that many of you are still a little skeptical," Obama, an Illinois senator, told a Martin Luther King Jr. banquet in Las Vegas last week. "But not as skeptical as you were before Iowa. Sometimes it takes other folks before we believe ourselves."
Election Day polling in recent Democratic contests has shown him with up to 80 percent of the black vote.
If Obama comes close to those margins in South Carolina, he'll likely win the Democrats' first Southern primary. Blacks are expected to cast half, or more, of the votes in Saturday's primary.
Obama returned to South Carolina last night, after preaching at Ebenezer Baptist, King's old church, in Atlanta earlier in the day. There, he alluded to a recent racially tinged debate with the Clinton camp "that served to obscure the issues, instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation. None of our hands are clean."
But he opened a more aggressive phase of his campaign yesterday while addressing a racially diverse crowd of about 2,500 a few blocks from the Statehouse in Columbia, accusing Hillary and Bill Clinton of intentionally distorting his words. His sharper language signaled Obama's intention to counter what is expected to be an all-out campaign this week by former President Clinton to rally black support for his wife's candidacy around the state.
Clinton, Obama and John Edwards are to meet in a debate at 8 p.m. today in Myrtle Beach, S.C., sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Institute.
