Edith Renfrow Smith, a 'memory keeper' and living link to history, dies at 111

 

Edith Renfrow Smith (photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin)

     In 2021, a former CPS teacher named Greg Lopatka asked me if I wanted to go with him to visit a former colleague who was about to turn 107. My reflexive response — "God no, why would I want to do that?" — immediately struck me as not exactly the path of the hero. If there is one truth in my business, it's "If you don't go, you never know." So I overcame inertia, and agreed to go. I did not expect much, and showed up at Edith Renfrow Smith's apartment without so much as Googling her name. Was I in for a surprise, almost a shock, as I asked my questions, and her extraordinary life unspooled.  I feel very blessed to have known this amazing woman.

   Edith Renfrow Smith was born in Iowa two weeks before the start of World War I. Her earliest memories involve the end of the war in 1918 and a neighbor who came home having lost both legs. She met aviator Amelia Earhart while an undergraduate at Grinnell College, where she became the first Black female graduate, class of 1937. After graduation, she came to Chicago to work at the YMCA and was living in the city Friday when her long, extraordinary life ended.
     Mrs. Smith was 111. She had celebrated Christmas with family but then stopped eating.
     "She felt it was time," said her daughter, Alice Frances Smith, 80. "She said she was tired."
     Mrs. Smith was one of perhaps a thousand "supercentenarians” — people who live to 110 — in the world, and a living link to history. She clearly remembered her grandparents, born in slavery, her memory so sharp she was included in the SuperAging Research Initiative at the University of Chicago, a similar study at Northwestern and a genetics study in Boston.
     Mrs. Smith was revered at Grinnell, honored as a pioneer and role model to young women.
     "To be in her presence was to travel through time and space because Miss Edith was a memory keeper," said Dr. Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, the chair in gender, women’s and sexuality studies at Grinnell. "With ease and pride, she recounted two centuries of her family’s history, dating back to the 1830s. ... We followed her meticulous recollections to explore her extended family’s deep Iowa roots, which were laid before the Civil War. She guided our knowledge of other Black families who called Grinnell home in the early 20th century, and she made visible the Rosenwald Scholars. This handful of Black men attended Grinnell in the 1920s and ate Sunday dinner at her family home. Although all of her five siblings were college educated, it is from the Rosenwald Scholars that Miss Edith first 'caught a vision' of attending Grinnell College specifically."
     Mrs. Smith was granted an honorary doctorate in 2019.
     “Grinnell has been my life," she told the audience.
     In 2022, a dorm was named after her — Renfrow Hall, a new facility designed to encourage interaction between students and community residents.
     "We have much to learn from her steadfastness and perseverance, her excellence and her belief that we can do better," Grinnell President Anne F. Harris said at the ceremony. "She has taught so many over generations. It is deeply meaningful and fitting that this building focused on students, their residential and learning experiences, and situated at the intersection of the town and the college, will bear her name,”
     She was born July 14, 1914, in Grinnell, the fifth of six children. Her father, Lee Renfrow, was a chef at the Monroe Hotel. Her mother, Eva Pearl, took in laundry.
     In 1940, she married Henry T. Smith, a milkman for the Borden Milk Company. They had two daughters, Edith Virginia and Alice Frances.
     The family moved to Bronzeville, where they lived across from Wayman Hancock, a meat inspector.

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