Oseola McCarty was born in 1908, and raised in Hattiesburg by her grandmother and aunt, who cleaned houses, cooked, and took in laundry. As a child, Oseola would come home from elementary school and iron clothes, stashing the money she earned in her doll buggy. The three women relied completely on each other, and when the aunt returned from a hospitalization unable to walk, Oseola dropped out of sixth grade to care for her and take up her work as a washerwoman. She never returned to school. Oseola said, “I knew there were people who didn’t have to work as hard as I did, but it didn’t make me feel sad. I loved to work, and when you love to do anything, those things don’t bother you. Sometimes I worked straight through two or three days. I had goals I was working toward. That motivated me and I was able to push hard. Work is a blessing. As long as I am living, I want to be working at something. Just because I am old doesn’t mean I can’t work.” And hers was not a standard-issue job. McCarty scrubbed her laundry by hand on a rubboard. She did try an automatic washer and dryer in the 1960s, but found that “the washing machine didn’t rinse enough, and the dryer turned the whites yellow.” The machine was almost immediately retired, and she went back to her Maid Rite scrub board, water drawn from a nearby fire hydrant, and 100 feet of open-air clothesline. This extraordinary work ethic, pursued straight through to her retirement at age 86, apparently produced results her customers appreciated. “Hard work gives your life meaning,” stated McCarty. “Everyone needs to work hard at somethin’ to feel good about themselves. Every job can be done well and every day has its satisfactions. If you want to feel proud of yourself, you’ve got to do things you can be proud of.” Shortly after she retired, McCarty did something that made many Americans very proud of her. She had begun to save almost as soon as she started working at age eight. As the money pooled up in her doll buggy, the very young girl went to the bank and deposited. These sturdy habits ran together to produce McCarty’s final secret. When she retired in 1995, her hands painfully swollen with arthritis, this washerwoman who had been paid in little piles of coins and dollar bills her entire life had $280,000 in the bank. Even more startling: she decided to give most of it away, not as a bequest, but immediately. Setting aside just enough to live on, McCarty donated $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi to fund scholarships for worthy but needy students seeking the education she never had. When they found out what she had done, over 600 men and women in Hattiesburg and beyond made donations that more than tripled her original endowment. Today, the university presents several full-tuition McCarty scholarships every year. Reminded that the university she was giving her money to had been white-only until the 1960s, she answered with equanimity: “They used to not let colored people go out there. But now they do. I am proud that I worked hard and that my money will help young people who worked hard to deserve it. I’m proud that I am leaving something positive in this world. My only regret is that I didn’t have more to give.” In 1998 the University of Southern Mississippi awarded McCarty an honorary degree. She received an honorary doctorate from Harvard University, and President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal, the nation’s second-highest civilian award. Cable TV mogul Ted Turner decided to donate a billion dollars to charity after hearing her story. He was quoted in the New York Times saying, “If that little woman can give away everything she has, then I can give a billion.” Oseola McCarty died of liver cancer at the age of 91. In 2019 McCarty’s home was moved to Hattiesburg’s Sixth Street Museum District and turned into a museum.

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