Viola Roberts Lampkin Brown celebrated her 110th birthday at her home in Virginia last week, October 4.
The legendary Libra joins a rare list of living people in America—just 6 in all— who’ve reached supercentenarian status. And you know mama has seen some things!
She has “eight grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, three great-great-grandchildren and more relatives and friends than she can count,” a local ABC News affiliate reported.
She also has had 12 brothers and sisters, and the family worked for a white household on the Springfield Farm in Clarke County.
Brown was born in Hume, Virginia in 1911. That year, Kappa Alpha Psi was founded, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was just a state senator and decades away from serving his first presidential term, and Marcus Garvey founded the UNIA.
Volunteers presented a cake to Ms. Brown (you know we can’t forget that ‘Ms.’ for our elders!) and sang her happy birthday during the celebration. The chair of the Clarke County Board of Supervisors presented her with a proclamation declaring October 4 “Viola Roberts Lampkin Brown Day.”
After living for over a century as a Black woman in this country, she deserves every day to be Ms. Viola Roberts Lampkin Brown Day.
