106-year-old in Obama speech has led active life in Atlanta

Tuesday night, for the second time in this election, Ann Nixon Cooper was a part of history.

The first time was when the 106-year-old Atlanta woman voted for Barack Obama for president in October. The second was when the candidate she voted for gave her the ultimate shout-out in his election night speech.
“This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight’s about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta,” President-elect Obama told throngs of people in Chicago’s Grant Park and millions watching on TV and the Internet. “She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.”

A biography of Cooper on the Web site thehistorymakers.com says she was born in Shelbyville, Tenn., about 50 miles south of Nashville. She was raised in Nashville by uncles and an aunt and attended Nashville public schools, according to a 2004 interview with The History Makers.

In 1922, she married Albert Berry Cooper, a dentist from Nashville. The couple soon moved to Atlanta, where Dr. Cooper opened a dental practice and his wife raised their four children. Thehistorymakers.com biography says Cooper was a homemaker for the majority of her life, except for a brief stint as a policy writer for the Atlanta Life Insurance Co.

She has served on a countless number of boards and committees in Atlanta over the years. Cooper and her husband counted as their friends or acquaintances such luminaries as educators W.E.B. DuBois, Lugenia Burns Hope, John Hope Franklin, Benjamin E. Mays and E. Franklin Frazier, the Web site says.

There is an Ann N. Cooper Collection at the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System’s Auburn Avenue Research Library on African-American Culture and History. The collection contains items from 1922 to 1956, including a daybook, two scrapbooks and other personal effects from the Coopers, according to the Digital Library of Georgia Web site.

Tuesday night, Obama spoke about Cooper for more than a minute, chronicling several of the historic events that have occurred during her 106 years.

“She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky, when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin,” he said in a transcript of the speech posted on cnn.com. “And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America — 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.”

Source: ajc.com