Centenarian lauded in US inauguration speech dies
Wednesday December 23 2009
Ann Nixon Cooper, the Atlanta centenarian lauded by US President Barack Obama in his election night speech last year, has died. She was 107.
Mr Obama, in his 2008 speech, called Mrs Cooper (pictured left) an example of "the heartbreak and the hope" of the past century. He noted she was born at a time when women and blacks couldn't vote and lived to cast her ballot for the country's first black president.
Yesterday, Mr Obama praised Mrs Cooper's life of service and offered his condolences.
"It is especially meaningful for me that she lived to cast a vote on Election Day 2008, and it was a deep honour for me to mark her life in the speech I delivered that night," he said. "It was a life that captured the spirit of community and change and progress that is at the heart of the American experience; a life that inspired and will continue to inspire me in the years to come."
Credit
Mrs Cooper died on Monday at her southwest Atlanta home on Martin Luther King Jr Drive. She would have turned 108 on January 9.
On Inauguration Day, she proudly hosted a full house of media and guests to watch Mr Obama take office -- a feat for which she took partial credit.
When one of her grandsons asked: "How do you feel about having a black president?" she quickly responded: "I helped put him there."
Mrs Cooper outlived her husband, Dr Albert B Cooper, a prominent Atlanta dentist, who died in 1967, and three of her four children.
In her 90s, she jokingly claimed civil rights icon Andrew Young as her "boyfriend."
Mrs Cooper was an active woman who did aerobics until she was 100, took the stairs until she broke her hip last year, wore out friends 20 years her junior on shopping trips and even dismissed Mr Young on the dance floor at her 104th birthday party, he recalled.
- Errin Haines in Atlanta
Irish Independent
