Rutha Mae Harris, as a student in 1961, sang freedom songs during a voting rights campaign in Georgia.

By KEVIN SACK

ALBANY, Georgia - Rutha Mae Harris backed her car out of the driveway early Tuesday morning, pointed it toward her polling place on Mercer Avenue and started to sing softly:
“I’m going to vote like the spirit say vote.
“I’m going to vote like the spirit say vote,
“I’m going to vote like the spirit say vote,
“And if the spirit say vote I’m going to vote,
“Oh Lord, I’m going to vote when the spirit say vote.”
As a 21-year-old student, Miss Harris had bellowed that same freedom song at mass meetings at Mount Zion Baptist Church in 1961, the year Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, a universe away. She sang it again while marching on Albany’s City Hall, where she and other black students demanded the enforcement of their right to vote, and in the cramped and filthy cells of the city jail, which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described as the worst he had ever inhabited.
For those like Miss Harris who had endured jailings, beatings and threats to their livelihoods because they wanted to vote, the trip to the polls on Tuesday culminated a lifelong journey. As they exited the voting booths, some in wheelchairs, others with canes, these foot soldiers of the civil rights movement could not suppress their jubilation or their astonishment at having voted for an African-American for president of the United States.
“Things are better,” Miss Harris, 67, said with a gratified smile. “It’s time to reap some of the harvest.”
Many, like the Reverend Horace C. Boyd, who was then and is now pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, viewed the moment in biblical terms . If Dr. King was the movement’s Moses, doomed to die without crossing the Jordan, it would fall to Mr. Obama to be its Joshua, they said.
“King made the statement that he viewed the Promised Land, won’t get there, but somebody will get there, and that day has dawned,” said Mr. Boyd, 81, who pushed his wife in a wheelchair to the polls. “I’m glad that it has.”
It was a day most never imagined they would live to see. From their vantage point amid the cotton fields and pecan groves of Dougherty County, where the movement for voting rights faced some of its most determined resistance, the country simply did not seem ready.
Yes, the world had changed in 47 years. At City Hall, the offices once occupied by the segregationist mayor, Asa D. Kelley Jr., and the police chief, Laurie Pritchett, are now filled by Mayor Willie Adams and Chief James Younger, both of whom are black. But much in this black-majority city of 75,000 also seems the same: neighborhoods remain starkly delineated by race, and blacks are still five times more likely than whites to live in poverty.
Miss Harris, a retired teacher who was jailed three times in 1961 and 1962, had been so convinced that Mr. Obama could not win white support that she backed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the primaries. “I just didn’t feel it was time for a black man, to be honest,” she said. “But the Lord has revealed to me that it is time for a change.”
Late Tuesday night, when the networks declared Mr. Obama the winner, she could not hold back the tears, the emotions of a lifetime released in a flood. She shared a lengthy embrace with friends gathered at the Obama headquarters, and then led the exultant crowd in song.
“Glory, glory, hallelujah,” she sang. After a prayer, she joined the crowd in chanting, “Yes, we did!”
Among the things Miss Harris appreciates about Mr. Obama is that even though he was in diapers while she was in jail, he seems to respect what came before. “He’s of a different time and place, but he knows whose shoulders he’s standing on,” she said.
When the voting rights movement came to Albany in 1961, fewer than 100 of Dougherty County’s 20,000 black residents were registered to vote, said the Reverend Charles M. Sherrod, one of the first field workers sent here by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
The campaign spread rapidly after the arrival of Mr. Sherrod and other voting-rights organizers, and Dr. King devoted nearly a year to the effort. But the movement met its match in Albany’s recalcitrant white leaders, who filled the jails with demonstrators while avoiding the kind of violence that drew media outrage and federal intervention in other civil rights battlegrounds. The energy drained from the protests, and Dr. King moved on to Birmingham, Alabama, counting Albany as a tactical failure.
Mr. Sherrod, 71, who settled in Albany and continues to lead a civil rights group here, argues that the movement succeeded; it simply took time. He said he had felt the weight of that history when he cast a ballot . He thought of the mass meetings, the songs of hope and the sermons of deliverance. “This is what we prayed for, this is what we worked for,” he said.
Mount Zion Baptist has now been preserved as a landmark. Across the street, Shiloh Baptist, founded in 1888, still holds services in the sanctuary where Dr. King preached at mass meetings.
Among those leading Sunday’s worship was the associate pastor, Henry L. Mathis, 53, a former city commissioner whose grandmother was a movement stalwart. “We sang through the years that we shall overcome,” he preached, “but our Father, our God, we pray now that you show that we have overcome.”