Hattie Lafayette

Hattie Lafayette was born in Alabama on 30 March 1897, and died in Michigan, U.S. on 10 September 2009, aged 112 years, 164 days. She lived for exactly ten years less than Jeanne Calment, the oldest authenticated person ever. Lafayette remembered washing dishes at Greensboro for Caucasians, who, she reported, were never mean to her and that she had a happy childhood. Lafayette was one of 21 children in her family and remembers being the only one out of them her father would take with him to visit his Caucasian sisters. Lafayette could recall the days in which white people still disliked black people, and would often kill them. She reports seeing a lynched man hanging from a tree, despite her father's attempts to stop her seeing the body. During Lafayette's life, she worked picking cotton and nursing other people's children. After working in a Detroit hospital, Lafayette moved back home to care for her cancer-stricken brother. She also became a deaconess at Louis Chapel in Albion. Lafayette credits her long life to never smoking, never drinking, and never trying to dance.