When 106-year-old Virginia McLaurin went to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. on Thursday, it was not the fulfillment of a lifelong dream to meet the first black president. Such a president wasn’t a dream any reasonable black person born in the first half of the 20th century entertained.

Ms. McLaurin was born in segregated South Carolina, the heart of the Old Confederacy, in 1909. She came into the world 44 years after a great war was fought to free her people from 246 years of bondage in the land of the free. When she was a child, nearly every living black person in South Carolina who was middle age or older understood from bitter personal experience what human bondage was all about. Even for free blacks, freedom was never an abstraction. Neither was slavery.

As a little girl, Virginia McLaurin could hear slavery’s chains being broken by the strongest voices of the church choir. She could see the old humiliations slide away when people gathered to dance. Any time she wanted to, she could feel the calloused hands of those who had borne the weight of involuntary servitude without any hope of compensation. Blues was a language that even the smallest child understood. It was not a musical genre to be ignored or taken for granted.

How many times had she sat on someone’s lap listening to unbelievable tales of family sacrifice and odd plantation cruelties from those who had experienced them firsthand? The old ways were still reflected in the peonage system that had replaced it. The vagrancy laws continued to do what the Black Codes no longer could — deliver men from her community to prison farms where they would provide free labor for corporations under a name other than slavery.

Still, there was room for hope in the dark world she was born into. Someone who loved this remarkable woman who met with the president and the first lady on Thursday had taken the time to teach her to dance, despite being born into a world that would have preferred she remain constantly on her knees. She was a child of Jim Crow who defied the odds and all expectations.

Watching the amazing video of Virginia McLaurin dancing with President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama at the White House was the culmination of hopes no one would have dared articulate 106 years ago. It would have been madness to imagine such an honor. It would have been more reasonable to imagine a man walking on the moon than it would have been to imagine a black woman born in rural South Carolina being escorted through the front door of the White House to be personally greeted by a black president and his wife.

And even after 12 Americans visited the moon and walked on it, very few living Americans would have imagined until relatively recently that someone like Virginia McLaurin and the Obamas would cross paths at the White House. After all, despite being “the People’s House,” 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. has spent much of its history as the most important domicile in what was once a thoroughly segregated town.

When Ms. McLaurin said, “I thought I would never live to get in the White House,” she was not engaging in hyperbole. She’s seen and experienced the humiliations of Jim Crow personally and bristled at the limitations put upon her. Still, she managed to get an education. She also participated in the fight for civil rights. She refused to be complacent. “I am so happy,” she said. “A black president; a black wife; and I’m here to celebrate black history.”

Then she did a remarkable thing. Virginia McLaurin coaxed a president known for his dignity and stoicism to dance. Mrs. Obama also danced. The three of them channeled the joy of the moment perfectly. Only the deadest of souls can look at that video and not cheer at its defiance of every racist cliche that has ever been taught as gospel in America.

I tear up every time I watch that video because I know that, in a way, we’re all witnessing something that defies the infernal logic of American bigotry. We’re watching something that was never supposed to happen in a country built upon the shaky edifice of white supremacy. Virginia McLaurin’s visit to the White House where she was greeted by a black president is an “impossible” event that could never have been predicted or believed a century ago.

Mr. and Mrs. Obama were granted a great privilege in meeting Virginia McLaurin. She connected them to an old world that would break under the weight of opportunity in the new world. In turn, Ms. McLaurin clasped the uncalloused hands of an American future very few of her contemporaries could have possibly imagined. It was something that snuck up on her near the end of a long and fruitful life. Maybe this is what the American dream really looks like.

Tony Norman: tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631.

Correction, Feb. 28, 2016: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated when Virginia McLaurin visited the White House.

First Published: February 26, 2016, 5:00 a.m.