Two months after the death of Virginia Davis Jefferson, family and friends continue to celebrate her record-breaking, 11-decade life and legacy.
Jefferson, the Commonwealth of Virginia’s oldest living resident, died June 4 in Lynchburg, just two months shy of what would have been her 112th birthday, on Aug. 14. Before her passing, she’d survived “two world wars, Jim Crow, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and President John F. Kennedy, the 2001 terror attacks, the presidencies of 20 U.S. Presidents from William Howard Taft to Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and two pandemics including the Spanish Flu and COVID-19,” according to her obituary.
“She was registered and validated by both the LongeviQuest and the Gerontology Research Group (GRG) publications as the oldest living Virginian dated August 14, 2023,” the obituary noted.
Three hundred people crowded into the small Altha Grove Baptist Church in Forest, Virginia, on June 10 to pay tribute to the pianist and pastry chef whose life advice to the world was to be kind. While many recalled her skills as a cook, pastry chef, musician and seamstress, others focused on her zest for life and ability to spread joy.
Jefferson was “the most caring, generous, helpful and concerned person you would ever meet, who expressed love and compassion to all of her family, friends, and acquaintances,” said her nephew, Gilliam Cobbs.
Jefferson attributed much of her longevity to her “hardworking demeanor and her belief in God. Her best advice was ‘to work hard, get an education, and above all else, treat people right,’ ” according to her obituary.
Alonza Davis, Jefferson’s father, married Otelia Craighead Davis and raised their nine children on a tobacco farm in tiny Forest, Virginia, where Virginia Jefferson was born. A 2020 census recorded Forest’s population as 11,709.
It was there where Jefferson’s sunny outlook on life emerged. On the family property, hard work was the norm. Girls were expected to plow the fields just like the boys. The family grew tobacco and raised cows, chickens, and hogs. They grew vegetables and sold them at market in Lynchburg.
Despite the intense labor, Jefferson viewed it as “always having a good time,” said her biographer, Gloria Braxton, Ph.D, who has written about Jefferson and other Black centenarians in Central Virginia. Braxton met Jefferson in 2013 and spoke during her homegoing service in June.
“Walking nine or 10 miles was not a big deal in those days. So everybody walked to church, school and wherever one needed to go,” Braxton wrote in Jefferson’s biography.
Like many Black children who grew up in the rural South, Jefferson received one pair of shoes a year, went barefoot in the summer and received fruit and a doll for Christmas while her brothers received little red wagons.
“Her mom made her clothes, but she has made her own clothes since she was 11 or 12 years old,” Braxton wrote when Jefferson was still alive.
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Jefferson joined Altha Grove Baptist Church in Forest as a child. This was perhaps was part of the reason she had her own designated parking space at the church for her Lincoln Town Car Continental that she drove until age 106. For 49 years, Jefferson’s uncle was a pastor at Altha Grove, where Jefferson once played the organ purchased by her cousin, Georgia Everett, said Braxton. (When Everett died in 2016, she also was 111.)
Jefferson’s intelligence and sense of humor punctuated her life, Cobbs said during a recent interview with Black News & Views. Cobbs, 91, often spent time with Jefferson and her husband, Malcolm Murrell Jefferson, when he was a child. For 10 years, from ages 16 to 26, Cobbs lived with the couple, he said.
The Jeffersons married in 1938 and had a daughter, Langhorne Jefferson Anderson, and Langhorne’s twin brother, who was stillborn. The Jeffersons were married 70 years until Malcolm Jefferson died in 2008.
Cobbs moved in with his aunt and uncle after they asked him to work at the Boonsboro Country Club, where they worked and actually lived for five years during World War II. Malcolm Jefferson managed the club and Virginia Jefferson worked as a cook and baker. Her specialty was apple pie and several of her recipes were published in local cookbooks, said Cobbs.
After the war ended, the couple moved back to Forest and eventually relocated to Lynchburg in 1953. Jefferson lived in Lynchburg until age 106, when she moved to a local retirement facility.
“She was such a wonderful person, her husband, too,” recalled Cobbs, a former Lynchburg middle and high school principal. “I haven’t gotten over seeing her. She knew everybody in the family… their ages and who married whom.”
Keeping up with so many family members was not easy given that Jefferson was the fifth of her parent’s nine children. She was the last surviving sibling of her parents’ marriage.
Despite her limited formal education, Jefferson was a lifelong learner, who enjoyed solving crossword puzzles, playing golf, billiards, and staying on top of the news, he said.
“She was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat,” said Cobbs. “I didn’t have to read anything because she knew it all.”
Jefferson taught herself and her daughter, Langhorne Jefferson Anderson, to play piano, Cobbs said. After graduating from Dunbar High School in Lynchburg in 1959, she attended Howard University and North Carolina Central University where she studied music. As a member of Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia, Anderson played piano for Gillfield’s sanctuary choir and male chorus. Gillfield Baptist Church is the second-oldest Black Baptist congregation in Petersburg and one of the oldest in the country. It has the oldest handwritten record book of any Black church.
Anderson died at age 70 in 2012.
Asked whether there was anything that clouded Jefferson’s positive nature, Braxton replied that while she was “a person of high spirit, she most lamented the loss of so many of her family members and friends. But I always reminded her that she had many friends who visited her all the time.”
At the time of her death, “she just closed her eyes,” Braxton said. “She was always in pretty good health.”
Jefferson’s nephew agreed.
Virginia Jefferson showed no signs of memory loss and had even survived two bouts of COVID-19, Cobbs said.
Asked how his aunt felt about America’s current political state, Cobbs replied, “She always said ‘I feel so blessed to have seen the racial progress in this country.’ She would have been out of her mind to see Kamala Harris to be nominated as the first Black woman for president in this country.”
