Residents astounded, ecstatic about Obama's election victory

John Jennings cast the first vote in his Champaign precinct Tuesday, and he surprised himself by how emotional he'd felt.

"I was thinking about my grandparents and how I came up in Mississippi in this rural, painfully impoverished fashion," he said. "My grandparents were illiterate – they couldn't even have read a ballot – and I'm about to vote for the first African-American president.

"It moved me to tears."

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