President Barack Obama simultaneously fulfills the fondest hopes and worst fears in certain groups of Americans as the first black man to hold the White House. What are keys for Obama to break down racial divisions in the country?

He has a good start based on the statistics of the campaign. The most prolific fundraiser in political history, according to OpenSecrets.org, Obama raised nearly $640 million in his campaign, and many of those dollars came from first-time donors in small checks. People of every stripe voted with their pocketbook before they ever set foot in a voting booth.

A Gallup poll released on Oct. 9 found that while 6 percent of voters said they were less likely to vote for Obama because of his race, 9 percent said they were more likely to vote for him -- which includes 6 percent of white voters who said Obama's race made them more likely to vote for him.

"Race has been an advantage for Obama," Gary Bauer, former presidential candidate and president of the Campaign for Working Families told NPR's Talk of the Nation on Oct. 30. Bauer said ethnicity was one of a very few issues Americans had to separate Obama from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the primaries.

But that hardly means racism is dead in America. Obama's opponent, Sen. John McCain, told CNN's Larry King in an interview the week before the election: "Look, there's racism in America -- we all know that," McCain said, before going on to state he didn't think race played a major role with voters.

Marjorie Fuller, director of West Virginia University's Center for Black Culture and Research, said Obama's background as the son of a Kenyan raised by a white mother in multicultural Hawaii makes him uniquely suited for this moment in history.

"We as a nation have pretty much not dealt with the issue of race. We've lived with the issue of race, but I don't know that we've actually learned how to deal with it," Fuller said. "I think if anyone has the ability to do it, he's proven himself to be a uniter. He knows how to bring people together."

But how to get to those corners of the country where the Confederate flag still flies and people look back fondly at a Jim Crow past?

"There's little he can do for Deep South. He'll be president -- not Moses," said Dr. Judson Jeffries, professor of African-American and African studies at Ohio State University. "Because of his background, he has an outlook that very few folks can boast. No candidate since Robert Kennedy has been able to talk to people of all races with the ease that Obama has."

"For the vast majority of Americans, their politics are framed by dynamics of the future," said Dr. Manning Marable, of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. "(In the Deep South), notions of race are framed in an antiquated way that still informs social behavior. Barack is not going to change that. However, what has changed is a generational shift that been profound. Whites under the age of 40 did not live through Jim Crow and have not carried the ugliest assumptions of those years and generations. That's a group that's relatively open to his message."

The message of the campaign was not one of race, but one of equalizing the playing field for all in access to health care and educational reform.

Marable and Jeffries said the path for Obama's presidency was laid by an ever-expanding group of black leaders elected in majority-white areas. They include former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, Massachusetts Gov. Duval Patrick and Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies estimates that 16 percent of the nation’s African-American state legislators had won election in predominantly white districts.

"They tend to be elected from predominantly white constituencies, they eschew talking about race or talk about it in the class/poverty way," Marable said. "Their agenda is a kind of post-civil-rights agenda that speaks to the totality -- to everybody."

West Virginia University professor Gwen Bergner said that unlike Republican black appointees Justice Clarence Thomas and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who have opposed policies to achieve racial equality, Obama can integrate effectively by keeping a moderate tone that doesn't alarm whites.

"I think he has to be bipartisan and maintain his cool and calm demeanor. I think he has to continue the persona that he's developed for the campaign trail," Bergner said. "He's been cognizant of the mainstream resistance to issues like affirmative action. (He's asked blacks to) take responsibility rather than have government programs take care of them. His language on these issues has been conciliatory and mainstream and in some ways that are maybe helpful to moving forward on those issues."

Fuller said the hopes of more than just black or white America ride on the Obama administration.

"I think the entire world is holding its breath. This signals a change in America that the world thought they'd never see," Fuller said.