CLEVELAND (AP) — A black Ohio woman who attended Barack Obama’s inauguration in her wheelchair shortly after her 105th birthday has died.
Former social worker Ella Mae Johnson traveled to Washington with her nurse in January 2009 and watched as the nation’s first black president was sworn into office. She died Monday at 106.
Her death was confirmed Wednesday by the retirement and assisted care facility Judson at University Circle, where she’d lived since 1975.
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Johnson received a seat for the inauguration from Ohio’s U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown. She had said: “I want my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to be able to say, ‘She was there.’”
Johnson was born in Dallas. She graduated in 1925 from Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn. She earned a master’s degree in social sciences in 1928 from Cleveland’s Western Reserve University, now Case Western Reserve University.
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