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... Asked in 2023 how much history she had witnessed, she sighed: "A lot, a lot, a lot. A lot of good, and a lot of bad."

Renfrow Smith, a secretary turned public school teacher, lived a life directly connected to America's history of slavery as well as to the progress made in the 20th and 21st centuries.

"This has been the greatest century we have seen," Renfrow Smith told WGN, a television station in Chicago, where she lived most of her life. "There have been so many changes." ...

R.I.P. Edith Renfrow Smith