2025: Still Making News and Turning 111
Throughout 2025, Mrs. Renfrow Smith has continued to make news.
In February, the University of Chicago’s Healthy Aging & Alzheimer’s Research Care (HAARC) Center featured her in the article “Resilient 'SuperAgers' show the positive side of growing old.” Along with “baby superager” 84-year-old Sheila Nicholes, Mrs. Renfrow Smith spoke about the importance of Black elders participating in memory studies. As Phyllis Timpo, MS, Director of Community Engagement, Outreach, and Recruitment at the HAARC Center, emphasizes, the participation of Black elders “gives us a chance to tell the stories of amazing people on the South Side and West Side of Chicago who are able to be resilient and live long, full lives full of cool stories despite all the social determinants of health.”
In mid-June, University of Mississippi senior Yasmine Ware released her podcast episode, “Mrs. Edith Renfrow Smith — 110 years. 1 lesson: ‘No one is better than you.’" Ms. Ware is the host of Yasmine’s Warehouse, an award-winning podcast, and she is producing The Mound Bayou Memoirs, a documentary focused on the living history of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, an all-Black community founded in 1887 by formerly enslaved persons. Listen to the episode to hear about Mrs. Renfrow Smith’s upbringing in Grinnell and her fascinating connection to this Mississippi Delta town.
This short video from the Mound Bayou Museum provides additional information about how Grinnell College researchers Dr. Tamara Beauboeuf and Hemlock Stanier ’25 traced Mrs. Renfrow Smith’s extended family roots from Grinnell, the Jewel of the Prairie, to Mound Bayou, the Jewel of the Delta.
For her 111th birthday on Monday, July 14, 2025, family and friends of Mrs. Renfrow Smith gathered for a lunch and reception organized by the Brookdale Senior Living Center. Chicago Sun-Times journalist Neil Steinberg stopped by to extend his greetings in person and learn about how she had spent the last year. His article, “Every day that God gives you, use it,” points out that the supercentenarian is now “not one in a million, but closer to 1 in 10 million.”
