Barack Obama third black US Senator in 150 years

The Democrat became the lone African-American Senator, beating talk show host Alan Keyes in Illinois.

Democratic rising-star Barack Obama on Tuesday became the lone African-American Senator, beating ultra-conservative talk show host Alan Keyes in a landslide victory in Illinois.

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Television networks projected that Obama, 43, had soundly defeated Keyes in the contest to replace a retiring one-term Republican by some 70 percentage points, snagging a seat for the Democrats in the narrowly Republican-controlled Senate.

The charismatic Obama, son of a Kenyan father and American mother, was a relatively obscure Senate hopeful just a few months ago but he catapulted to prominence after giving an electrifying keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in July.

He was one of a handful of blacks running for US Senate seats this year, including his rival Keyes, but was considered the only African-American candidate with a realistic chance of winning.

Obama becomes only the third black Senator in 150 years. The last African-American to serve in the US Senate was Democrat Carole Moseley Braun, also of Illinois, who was defeated in 1998 by Fitzgerald after a single scandal-plagued term.

"The skinny kid with the funny name," as Obama has described himself, grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia.