It took the eighteenth president of her lifetime to send her an invitation to the White House, but sprightly 106-year-old Virginia McLaurin wasted none of the opportunity to dance all over the presidential carpet.
Some 55 million people have watched online video footage posted on the White House’s Facebook of the chirpy Ms McLaurin stealing the show by dancing with the President, followed by the First Lady and then both in unison.
Barack Obama was moved to implore his guest to “slow down” after her run to greet him belied the need for the walking stick she was holding aloft. As Ms McLaurin took Michelle Obama’s hand for a three-way quick-step, the First Lady quipped: “I wanna be like you when I grow up!” before being told the secret to be dancing at 106 is to, “Just keep movin’.”
Ms McLaurin was invited to the White House for 2016’s Black History Month celebrations after expressing her ambition to meet President Obama in 2013, when she was honoured for her full-time voluntary work with students with mental and physical disabilities.
In the video, she says, “I thought I would never be able to get into the White House. I am so happy.” And looking proudly up at Barack and Michelle Obama, she beams, “A Black President…yay…and his Black wife. Yes! And I’m here to celebrate Black history. Yea… that’s what I’m here for.”
After watching the viral video of her meeting with the President and his wife back, Ms McLaurin declared the experience to be “the joy of my whole entire life” before summing up “I can die smiling now.”
Virginia McLaurin was born below the Mason-Dixon Line in South Carolina in March 1909, just days after William Howard Taft succeeded Theodore Roosevelt to become the 27th President of the United States of America. Barack Obama is the 44th and, if his latest guest’s mobility is any indication of her general health, she has every chance of seeing the 45th Commander-in-Chief sworn in a year from now. She moved to DC, as close to the White House as she thought she was ever likely to get, when she was widowed in 1941.
1909 was also the year the NAACP – National Association for the Advancement of Colored (sic) People – was founded; on the day, had he survived, Abraham Lincoln would have become a comparatively youthful 100 years old!
