KEY POINTS:
Ann Nixon Cooper, the 106-year-old Atlanta woman whose long life was put on an international stage in Barack Obama's sweeping victory speech, had declared she "ain't got time to die" - because she wanted to watch a black man elected president of the United States.
When Mrs Cooper was born on 9 January 1902, in Shelbyville, Tennessee, 50 miles south of Nashville, women and African Americans were denied the vote. White women were enfranchised in 1920, but she had to wait until 1965 - when she was 63 - for black Americans to be certain of the same rights. And as hundreds of thousands of Atlanta residents flooded to the polls in early voting last month, she cast her ballot for the history-making Democrat.
"No matter what, you get out and vote," the former socialite declared then, when she was greeted at the polling station by the Atlanta mayor and a barrage of television crews. Later she told CNN that she was waiting for election night with much excitement.
"I ain't got time to die, because I got to see a black person. Yeah, I got to watch that." And then, in front of 250,000 people in Chicago and millions around the world watching on television, President-elect Obama declared that she was top of his mind.
"Tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America," he said, "the heartache and the hope, the struggle and the progress, the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can."
Despite a broken hip, two heart attacks and numerous blood transfusions in the past year, Mrs Cooper is full of the smiles and jokes and optimism that made her a minor celebrity in Atlanta. She still lives in the home - on a street named after Martin Luther King, the local pastor turned national civil rights leader, who she used to know - that she set up with her husband, who was a successful African American dentist.
Apart from a short stint as a policy writer for the Atlanta Life insurance company, she has been a home-maker, community activist and socialite, serving on countless local boards. Some of her early scrapbooks and pictures are in a collection of African American history here at the Atlanta-Fulton library.
And now she has become a symbol of the sweep of human history into which the new American president has cast himself. What, he wondered, would be the changes a new political generation would deliver to those that come after, and what change would his own two daughters see if they lived to be as old as Mrs Cooper.
"She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky," Mr Obama said.
"She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that We Shall Overcome.
"A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change."
The indignities and the segregations of life as a black woman in the South are still seared into the centenarian's memory, including the time she was threatened by a white man on a bus.
"I sat down with my packages," she remembered recently, "and he said: 'Don't sit down in front of me.' I see that hasn't been too many years ago."
Now, she hopes to see the inauguration of the first black US president, perhaps even travel to Washington for it. And she confided the secret of her long life: "I don't know how it happened, but being cheerful all the time might have a lot to do with it."
- INDEPENDENT
