CHICAGO: Mr Ron Hilson stood alone as the streets of Chicago filled with people celebrating the election of the first black president of the United States.

People around him spoke of how Senator Barack Obama has achieved the dream of racial equality that civil rights leader Martin Luther King described on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington 45 years ago.

The country has changed, they said. Anything is possible now.

Mr Hilson was hopeful they were right. But he had been hopeful before. And he had seen that hope die in 1968 when King was assassinated.

While the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s ended a brutal system of racial segregation in the South and led to the passage of laws that enabled all African-Americans to vote, race remains significant in the US, still woven into social and professional interactions.

While the income gap has been slowly narrowing over the past 40 years, the poverty rate for blacks is still three times that of whites, and blacks are twice as likely to be unemployed as whites.

If racial equality is to be achieved this time around, the black community will have to hold onto the hope and optimism which erupted on Tuesday night, Mr Hilson said.

Across the country, educators, community activists and students are hopeful that the election of Mr Obama, whose mother was a white American and father a black African, will provide much-needed inspiration to black youth.

Mr Mel Campbell, a science teacher in Corona, California, who also leads a cultural issues class, told ABC News he has seen black students engaged in the election like never before.

'I've got students who don't talk politics who are talking politics, who are talking about futures, who are talking about plans, who wouldn't ordinarily be speaking in those terms,' he said. 'This presidential election has kicked open (a door) in the minds of our underachieving kids.'

Mr Obama also helps fight negative stereotypes of black men, said 17- year-old David Williams, one of Mr Campbell's students. 'An African-American like Obama, he shows you can actually obtain an education, you can actually be smart and make a difference,' said the student. 'Obama is the perfect role model for all black men.'

'There are many stigmas against black males, that we're lazy or that we may be uneducated,' said high school student George Ellzey, a senior at Hales Franciscan High School in Chicago. 'But Barack Obama showed that we aren't, and that we are much more than that.'

While educators say that Mr Obama's multicultural background may inspire students of all colour, young black males are seen as an especially needy demographic.

At the start of this year, one in nine black males aged between 20 and 34 was in jail, compared with one in 30 among all American men in the same age group, according to the Pew Centre on the States' Public Safety Performance Project.

Black males also lag behind black females, Hispanics and whites in employment rates. Many attribute the underachievement of black males to the proliferation of fatherless black households, especially in US inner cities.

Mr Samson Davis, 35, was raised by his mother in a tough neighbourhood in Newark, New Jersey. Growing up, he saw males who were often drug dealers and car thieves.

'They were reverse role models,' he told ABC News.

Mr Davis, who grew up to pursue a career in medicine and to combat 'reverse role models' by travelling around the US talking to teens about their aspirations, said Mr Obama's example should prove especially powerful to inner-city teens.

However, amid the hope, there were reverberating notes of caution.

Several commentators said the election result will do nothing to challenge racial inequity.

The danger of an Obama presidency is that his achievement masks the nation's continuing racial injustices, said Mr James Rucker, founder of the civil rights group Colour of Change.

'Now that we've got a black person in the most powerful and most highly symbolic place, I do expect many white Americans will consider it one less reason for black Americans to whine,' he said.

'The problem with that is, we still have housing discrimination, hate crimes, the overrepresentation of African-Americans in prison and inequities in education. One election doesn't make all that go away.'