TAMPA — Ann Nixon Cooper lived to vote for an African-American man for president, and she lived to see him win.
She lived to watch him enumerate the historic moments she'd witnessed, and at the conclusion of his victory speech, to hear him mention her name.
She lived 107 years.
On Monday, at home in Atlanta, she died.
Her grandson, Times columnist Ernest Hooper, updated readers about her just three days earlier. Her life has been made into a book, A Century and Some Change: My Life Before the President Called My Name. It goes on sale in January.
He mentioned some highlights — her coming of age in Nashville after the first World War, and her gentlemen admirers; her pregnancy in times of segregation, and the births of her two oldest children in a makeshift clinic; the Coca-Cola she enjoyed at a department store lunch counter, when it finally integrated.
"Knowing that her health was failing, I was reluctant to write about her book," Hooper said. "However, I thought it was important to share with her through my column how proud I am of her life and her legacy before she passed on."
Funeral arrangements are pending.
Mrs. Cooper was the third youngest of eight children, born on a farm in Shelbyville, Tenn. Twenty years later, she married Dr. Albert Berry Cooper Jr., and they moved to Atlanta where he had begun a dental practice. They had four children.
She became active in Atlanta's civic and cultural life and founded or helped to found several organizations that remain Atlanta institutions, such as the Gate City Day Nursery Association, the Girls Club Guild and Troop 95, Atlanta's first black Boy Scout troop.
She also worked on voter education and registration, and insisted on voting in every election, "because there were so many years we weren't allowed to vote, you know. I felt I had to, and I wanted to."
Barack Obama became aware of Mrs. Cooper after CNN profiled her as she cast her vote at a local precinct in Atlanta in 2008. The night of his election, as she sipped wine and nibbled on cookies, she heard him say this:
"So tonight, let us ask ourselves, if our children should live to see the next century, if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?
"This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment."
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