BROOKLYN — I am too politically savvy and too smart to have been surprised by my experience in my polling place on Election Day. But I was indeed astonished.

The school cafeteria was the polling place — P.S. 267 — pretty much in the heart of Boerum Hill. I have been voting in this election district, under different numbers over time, for 37 years, and in a lot of other places before that.

I have never seen anything like it on Tuesday. There were clearly at least 200 people in the room, most of them in lines, waiting to vote in four election districts (EDs). This was at 9 a.m. When I left at 10:15 a.m., the crowd had thinned somewhat.

My back can no longer support standing around for that length of time, and I left the school without the spriteness and spirit I had when I entered.

Where did all these people come from? About 90 percent of them were white, most well off, of all ages. A large number of them were youngish and first-time voters. I would expect the crowd I saw went for Obama at least 9 to 1.

There was a feel in the air, a sense that I haven’t seen since 1960 and Jack Kennedy’s time.

I should have anticipated something like this, but I didn’t. (I’m trying to figure out why not; perhaps because my chief desire was to end the eight years of national disaster and I almost didn’t care who did so.)

There was an emotional tug with me personally of which I was very much aware. When I was a junior in college at the University of Alabama, in 1956, there was an attempt to integrate the school. Most people don’t know about that emotional period — the drama lasted only a few days — and the attempt failed.

Unlike the 1960s, when the serious integration took place throughout the Deep South and George Wallace stood in the Alabama schoolhouse door, no one was prepared for the first attempt at Alabama.

A few of us in the student government tried to support the effort, not on the grounds of integration vs. segregation, but on the grounds that the law called for integration and we were honor-bound to support the law.

None of that worked, of course. The Black student, Autherine Lucy, spent one day on campus, there were demonstrations against the attempt, and workers from the nearby rubber factory showed up, some with guns. The state police got very nervous and got her off to Birmingham on the floorboards of a police car.

That night, the university dismissed Lucy on the grounds that she was a threat to the health and welfare of the students. That feeble decision was never really challenged.

(My parents, especially my mother, were afraid for my life and shipped a ceremonial sword to me. I still have that sword and used it once, quite uselessly, to chase a burglar down Bergen Street. Those who witnessed the incident still haven’t stopped laughing.)

These old thoughts of race and Alabama, of course, were stimulated by Obama’s run. Frankly, I never thought there would be a black president in my lifetime, and I looked very carefully at the races in the South.

I was more encouraged than I thought I would be. In five Deep South states, Obama ran ahead of the white Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, and he trailed in five others. I thought he might trail the ticket everywhere.

This suggests that too many black voters voted only for Obama, and that isn’t a good thing.

But we all are part of history, we turned a big page, and the fictional Atticus Finch must be smiling from somewhere.

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