RALEIGH - Sen. Barack Obama entered the presidential battle a year ago as the byproduct of dual worlds, someone who captured idealists by saying Americans can push beyond the barriers that have haunted humanity for generations. He wanted to be the candidate beyond race.

Yet two days before crucial primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, those very divisions now threaten to overshadow the battle between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

Here in the Tar Heel state, where issues involving race helped sink the prospects of candidates from Terry Sanford to Harvey Gantt, some white Democrats tell pollsters they still feel less comfortable putting a black person in the White House, and Obama gets huge support from blacks. In the past week, amid a new flare-up involving Obama's former pastor, it's clear that race is again involved in a statewide North Carolina political battle.

Yet times have changed in recent years. Obama retains a lead here. And Tuesday could be a watershed primary for a state bound by its history, proving that even in North Carolina, a black man can be nominated to the presidency.

To be sure, both candidates get support across racial lines. And yet the undercurrents are evident across the state, in the faces that congregate at Obama or Clinton rallies, in the advertisements clogging the airwaves, in the way some voters won't always elucidate their opposition to the other candidate.

"I think it's a racial thing instead of who's going to be the best president," said James "Tall Jack" Jackson, who is black and a member of Craven County's Democratic executive committee, after attending an event for Clinton last week.

"If Hillary wins it, some of the blacks are not going to vote [in November]," Jackson said. "If Obama wins it, some of the whites are not going to vote."

It was last weekend that Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, returned to the spotlight. Obama immediately denounced Wright and his speeches, in which Wright said, among other things, that the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, because it had engaged in terrorism.

But the publicity hurt. Polls showed erosion in Obama's double-digit lead in North Carolina.

"I think it's given pause to some people who have been supporting Obama," said Hunter Bacot, a political science professor and pollster at Elon University. "And for others it's given them a reason to oppose Obama beyond race."

Three weeks ago, Bacot found in a statewide poll that more North Carolina voters would be reluctant to cast a ballot for a woman than for a black man.

But Bacot suspects that if he conducted the statewide poll again, the results would differ.

"I think race would rival gender," Bacot said.

Gina Gilliam, an Apex real estate agent, said she'll have a difficult decision to make if Clinton doesn't win the nomination.

Obama "doesn't have the experience and gravitas for this day and time," Gilliam said.

"I don't know where he will fall on issues," she said. With Sen. John McCain, the certain Republican nominee, "at least I know."

Gilliam spent her early years in California and says she was raised not to pay attention to skin color. She is not troubled by Obama's mixed-race heritage, she said, but she thinks that because voters outside Illinois don't know Obama, they rely on racial stereotypes.

"They color in the blanks," Gilliam said.

A tumultuous history

Racial issues have shaped North Carolina politics since the Reconstruction era. In 1880, The New York Times detailed county-by-county violations of white Democrats keeping black Republicans from voting. In Wilmington in 1898, whites rioted and forced blacks from their homes after a local election, the only known political coup in U.S. history.

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