“It is especially meaningful for me that she lived to cast a vote on Election Day 2008, and it was a deep honor for me to mark her life in the speech I delivered that night,’’ the statement read. “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.’’
Mrs. Cooper died Monday at her Atlanta home on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. She would have turned 108 on Jan. 9.
On Inauguration Day, she proudly hosted a full house of media and guests to watch Obama take office, 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 first registered to vote on Sept. 1, 1941, but because she was a black woman in a segregated, sexist society, she did not exercise her right for years, deferring instead to her husband, Dr. Albert B. Cooper, a prominent Atlanta dentist.
Ann Nixon Cooper outlived her husband, who died in 1967, and three of her four children. She cast an early ballot for Obama on Oct. 16, 2008.
In her 90s, she jokingly claimed civil rights icon Andrew Young as her boyfriend. Young, a former Atlanta mayor and an ordained minister, was a fellow member of First Congregational Church.
Mrs. Cooper was an active woman who did aerobics until she was 100.
