She had dinner with Bobby Kennedy. Nat King Cole came to her parties. Martin Luther King sent her a telegram when her husband died and she has photographs of herself with his late wife Coretta on her sideboard.

In the early hours of yesterday morning, at the age of 106, she beat her personal best - Barack Obama singled out Ann Nixon Cooper for praise in his acceptance speech to hundreds of thousands of ecstatic supporters in Chicago.

The President-elect spoke of his admiration for Mrs Nixon Cooper, a well-to-do, monied centagenarian living in Atlanta whose own life has plotted the struggle of black Americans during the last century:

"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 colour of her skin."

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Mrs Nixon Cooper was not entirely susprised when she heard her name mentioned at the victory rally. A spokesman from the Obama campaign had called her on Tuesday afternoon at her home on Martin Luther King Drive in Atlanta, and told her that she was about to become America's most famous 106-year-old.

Speaking to The Times in her dining room yesterday afternoon, Mrs Nixon Cooper, said: "I stayed up late to watch his speech. I was elated, of course. It was very exciting. I never, never, never thought we would get a black President. Never."

That phone call, and that speech, piped into Mrs Nixon Cooper's front room, has brought the frail great grandmother, all but one of whose own children have already died, full circle.

It was in the same front room forty years ago that she entertained the people who led the black civil rights movement across America. It was in her adjoining drawing room that Nat King Cole partied next to her baby grand piano.

It was across the street in the former black segregated area of Atlanta, that her son opened a gas station that filled the cars of Dr King and Bobby Kennedy (her garndson - the teenage attendant, remembers the Democrat's thick flash of hair), and it was a ten minute walk, on the same road where the black Baptist pastor plotted the way forward for Black America at the now boarded-up Paschal Hotel.

Mr Obama's choice of Mrs Nixon Cooper as an example of the black movement was a clever one. The centenarian represents the very cream of black society, a far cry from the stereotypical images of Black culture that alienate conservative voters.

Born in Tennessee, in 1902, she was raised by her aunt after her mother died. By the age of 20, she had married a dentist, Albert Berry Cooper, from Nashville, Tennessee, and they moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where for a few months she worked as a policy writer for the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, before starting a family.

As her husband's dental practice prospered, Mrs Nixon Cooper turned to public work, serving for more than 50 years on the board of the Gate City Nursery Association, and helping to found the Girls’ Club for African-American Youth in Atlanta. While bringing up her five children, she also worked in the 1970s at the Ebenezer Baptist Church — where Dr King used to preach — helping people to read.

According to her 57-year old grandson, Albert Cooper, the segregated ghetto of Atlanta where she lives managed to shield itself from the worst of the violence against blacks during the fifties and sixties. He said: "We had a very big black community here, and we had everything we needed. Our own drycleaners, our own gas stations, our own buses, so we didn't need to sit at the back of the bus at all."

He explained that part of his grandmother's extensive and impressive social circle was created because, as a black woman, she was barred from having tea at the Richie Department store in Atlanta where wealthy, middle-class women would meet. "So she started book clubs and gin rummy clubs here, instead," he said. Her sequined cocktail dress still hangs behind a book shelf that shows off her tiny dancing shoes.

While those black leaders of forty years ago who fought hardest for equal rights are all dead, many of them, in photographs, stared out proudly as Mrs Nixon Cooper took that call.

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