The life journies of 106-year-old Lillian Boyd

Lillian Boyd was born in Washington, North Carolina, in 1919. At 106, her life experiences have been many. She and her four siblings grew up in a loving family where their parents always made sure there was food on the table, and they never went wanting. As a child, she worked in the tobacco fields, where you might find her sitting under a big tobacco leaf to get out of the sun. Racism was not a stranger. As Boyd said, “They didn’t like us and sometimes treated us like animals, so we didn’t like them much either.” That changed when she worked for many white families in Washington over the years, and even helped to raise one family’s child.

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