Black rapes white woman as payback for slavery.

RALEIGH - The 36-year-old woman cried on the witness stand in the Wake County Courthouse on Wednesday, recalling the night more than eight years ago when she said a man broke into her Raleigh apartment and raped her.

The woman testified during the first day of the criminal trial of James Bernard Henderson, a Georgia man who was named as a suspect last year in the September 1999 crime when a DNA match led police to him. She is not being named in line with a News & Observer policy not to identify those who report sexual assaults.

Henderson, 41, is facing felony charges of first-degree forcible rape, first-degree burglary, first-degree kidnapping and first-degree forcible sexual offense.

He faces more than 90 years in prison if he is convicted of all those charges, according to court records and Superior Court Judge Henry W. Hight Jr.

His attorney, Gary Presnell, indicated he would argue that the woman was not raped but had a consensual sexual relationship with Henderson.

The woman denied that, telling jurors she had never met Henderson before the attack. That night, she said, a man broke into her apartment, made her cover her face with a blanket and raped her.

She had fallen asleep on her couch after returning from a weekend trip to the mountains with her boyfriend, she said.

"I woke up to a vision of a man coming into my apartment with a gun," she said.

The woman also told jurors Henderson repeatedly said he was attacking her because her forefathers raped and enslaved his ancestors. The woman is white, and Henderson is black.

Henderson was not identified as a suspect until 2007, when the case was reopened and evidence was tested by agents with the State Bureau of Investigation as part of a renewed effort to analyze rape cases where evidence had been collected but not tested for DNA.

After the 1999 rape, the evidence was not initially tested because police had no named suspect and the SBI declined to test the evidence without that, Jeff Cruden, a Wake County assistant district attorney, said in his opening arguments.

Last year, evidence collected that night, including semen, was retested, and Raleigh police learned from SBI agents that the DNA matched that of Henderson, who was living in Georgia. He was arrested there in April and has been held in the Wake County jail since.

The trial is expected to continue today.