Obama welcomes mixed crowd in South Carolina campaign

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama campaigned in the key state of South Carolina, telling thousands of cheering supporters that seeing such a racially diverse crowd would have surprised people a generation ago.

Blacks were harassed if they walked across the statehouse grounds a few streets away, said Obama, a Democratic US senator from Illinois who is black.

“Twenty years ago, nobody would have believed this crowd right here in South Carolina,” Obama said yesterday during his first campaign visit to South Carolina, an early primary state where half the Democratic primary voters are black.

More than half of the 1,000 tickets the party distributed for the event were picked up by blacks, a party official said.

In another southern state, Virginia, Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani was heading a fundraiser in Richmond.

The former New York city mayor, who favours abortion rights, said yesterday if elected in 2008 he would not hesitate to appoint anti-abortion conservatives such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito to the federal bench.

The top US court legalised abortion with a 1973 ruling.