History circled back on itself this morning.

As a fourth-grader in 1964, Joy Vanhook Nelson and nine classmates integrated Aycock Elementary in rural Orange County.

Racists called her names. The high-school student who drove the elementary school bus insisted she and her black classmates sit at the back. And the school was named for one of the leaders of the Wilmington race riots in 1898.

This morning, she watched the nation's first black president be inaugurated from a spot on the national mall.

"I'm just elated," she said. "Growing up in the hard south, integrating my elementary school and then to see this — a black president — you know what I think about that."

Nelson, 53, moved to Long Island, New York, in 2002 to teach special education, but she comes back to Cedar Grove during the holidays.

In December, she got together with five of her classmates.

"We stayed up until 4:30 a.m. reminiscing about integration — what our parents wanted for us — and talking about the election," she said. "Life is good."

Democratic Senate candidate Kay Hagan's husband belonged to a country club that was de facto segregated.

Charles "Chip" Hagan III opposed the policy at the Greensboro Country Club, but remained a member for years before it admitted its first black member in 1995, a Hagan spokeswoman admitted Tuesday.

But she added that Hagan was never a member of the club herself.

"Chip supported broadening the membership to include African Americans and others," spokeswoman Colleen Flanagan said. "Though it took longer than it should have, Greensboro County Club fully desegregated in 1995 and remains so today."

Greensboro was one of the last clubs in the area to integrate, although African-Americans make up about 35 percent of the local population. Chip Hagan inherited the club membership from his father.

The head of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign criticized Hagan for not demanding that her husband leave the club earlier. (Politico)

The site of a sit-in at a Durham ice cream shop will get the state's fourth highway marker dedicated to the civil rights movement.

The June 23, 1957, sit-in of the Royal Ice Cream Co. didn't attract the attention of a similar protest three years later at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro.

But it passed muster with a panel if nine history professors.

In 2002, a state committee declared that the Durham sit-in didn't have enough statewide historical significance to receive a marker.

Local activists have been lobbying for a marker for years. (N&O)