Rochelle Bias, right, hugs her sister Lorraine as the two are overcome with emotion after President Obama is sworn in on Tuesday. Illustrates OBAMA-TIMES (category w), Los Angeles Times, (c) 2009. Moved Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009. (MUST CREDIT: Los Angeles Times photo by Jay L. Clendenin.)
ATLANTA " As she watched Barack Obama descend the steps of the U.S. Capitol to be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, 107-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper leaned forward in her seat and let out a contented sigh.
One of her grandsons asked, "How do you feel about having a black president?"
"Well," Cooper said, "I helped put him there."
And so she had.
It was not just Cooper. It was all the men and women of the black generations who endured the cruelties of Jim Crow, who knew the indignity of separate drinking fountains and the terror of snarling dogs. They fought back " with sit-ins and boycotts and ballots.
On Tuesday, with weathered hands and strength that belied their age, they applauded Obama " and the role they played in sending one of their own to the White House.
"I was hoping for a great change that would happen in my day," said Cooper, whose story was highlighted in Obama's speech the night he won the election. "I put my thoughts into ideas pointed towards better days for our people."
Mary K. Jones, a 78-year-old retired university professor in Detroit, has come a long way from the sweltering heat and segregation of Arkansas. She grew up there, along the banks of the Mississippi River, on the same 40 acres her great-grandmother " a former slave " received from the U.S. government.
"Jim Crow and segregation were something we were born into. It was just a way of life," Jones said Tuesday. "We lived in a certain area. We all knew where we could go or couldn't go. You stayed where you were. But they (whites) were in their place, too."
When Obama took the oath of office, Jones sat up in her chair, clasped her hands to her chest and smiled.
"There is still integrity. It's not lost," Jones said. "I feel very full."
In Birmingham, Ala., where protesting blacks faced fire hoses and police dogs in the 1960s, thousands gathered in historic Boutwell Auditorium to view the inauguration on a huge video screen. The old hall had the feel of a church revival, with gospel songs and flags waving.
"I never thought it would ever come," said 77-year-old Ted Roberts, who marched in civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham when segregationists held power.
At the historically black Alabama State University in Montgomery, Tonea Stewart was among those brought to tears watching the new president take office and marvel at how the nation had elected the son of a man who "less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant."
The 60-year-old chair of the theater department grew up in Greenwood, Miss., worked in the civil rights movement and campaigned for Obama. "I knew it would happen, but to see it happen in my lifetime is so powerful and so significant for this whole nation," he said.
For those who lived through such trying times, Obama's inauguration was an important link to the past and a moment to reflect on those who didn't live to see this day.
Mississippi state Sen. David Jordan, 75, a longtime voting-rights advocate who has vivid memories from his childhood in the segregated South, said prior to the inauguration that he wished he could speak with his late father.
"The first thing I would say is, 'Daddy, we have an African-American president,"' Jordan said. "He would shout to the top of his voice."
- Associated Press writers Corey Williams in Detroit, Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Ala., Phillip Rawls in Montgomery, Ala., and Emily Wagster Pettus in Jackson, Miss., contributed to this report.