Edith Renfrow Smith, the first Black woman to graduate from Grinnell College in Iowa and a longtime Chicago schoolteacher, remained mentally sharp well past 100, becoming the subject for medical researchers studying what they called “SuperAgers.”
Smith, 111, died of natural causes on Friday at the Breakers assisted living facility in Edgewater, where she had moved in October, said her daughter, Alice Frances Smith. She previously had lived in Lakeview.
Edith Renfrow was born in Grinnell, Iowa, on July 14, 1914, the fifth of six children. Her grandparents, George Craig and Eliza Jan Craig, were born into slavery. Her father was a hotel chef.
The Renfrows were one of the only African American families in Grinnell at that time, and her parents stressed the importance of education for all of their children.
“My mother insisted that education was the only thing that could not be taken away from them,” Smith told National Public Radio’s Scott Simon in 2023.
Smith graduated from Grinnell College in 1937 — 91 years after the college was founded — with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, becoming the first Black woman ever to graduate from the small liberal arts college and the 11th Black graduate of the college to that point.
While at Grinnell, Smith met Amelia Earhart when the famed aviator visited the campus.
“She was one of the celebrities that came to Grinnell to talk to the students,” Smith told National Public Radio in 2023. “And she was just like another one of us. It was a delightful visit.”
She married Henry Smith in 1940. The couple moved to Chicago’s South Side, and Smith worked at a South Side YWCA, at the University of Chicago and as a secretary to Ald. Oscar Stanton De Priest. She began a 22-year teaching career at Ludwig Van Beethoven Elementary School at 25 W. 47th St. on the South Side, retiring in 1976.
Jazz great Herbie Hancock lived across the street from the Smiths while growing up.
“(Edith) was a very sophisticated lady, and she and my mother hit it off very well,” Hancock told the Tribune in 2024. “My mother was always looking at things like art and culture and those things, and in the neighborhood, there weren’t a whole lot of people looking at that.”
Hancock credited Smith with introducing him to Grinnell College, from which he graduated.
“She talked about Grinnell being a great college for academics, and it made me think that Grinnell would be a really nice thing to do, it’d be a new experience because I’d never lived in a small town and I didn’t know anything about corn, and let’s see what happens,” Hancock said. “I’m happy I went there — it really changed my life, (because) it was where I really decided I wanted to be a jazz musician.”
In retirement, Smith was a longtime volunteer at the Art Institute of Chicago. As she reached her late 90s in the 2010s, she began drawing interest from researchers from Northwestern and from the news media, both of which were intrigued by Smith’s keen, vivid memory and her strong cognitive functioning.
She participated in Northwestern medical school’s 2017 study of “SuperAgers” that showed what was obvious to Smith: Social connections keep one sharp.
“I’m just a person who likes people,” she told the Tribune in 2017. “When you like people, you communicate.”
Edith Renfrow Smith works during an arts and crafts class on Nov. 7, 2017, at Bethany Retirement Community in Andersonville. Smith died Jan. 2, 2026, at 111. She was one of the “SuperAgers,” a group studied by Northwestern made up of elderly adults with the cognitive abilities of much younger adults. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)
And that love of people extended to strangers, as well. At one retirement community where she resided, Smith was one of nine people assigned to welcome new residents and to try to help make them feel at home.
“I have a smile for everybody,” she told the Tribune in 2018. “I try to learn someone’s name as soon as they come in.”
In 2018, Smith appeared on NBC’s “Today” show, and three years later, she appeared in a PBS program, “Build a Better Memory Through Science.”
Grinnell awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2019, named a library after her in its Black Cultural Center, and named a student art gallery for her in another campus building in 2021. And in 2024, a residence hall building at Grinnell was named for her. Smith — at age 110 — was on hand for its dedication ceremony, in September 2024.
Due to her many years of volunteer work, Smith was inducted into the Chicago Senior Citizens Hall of Fame in 2009.
“Wake up every morning and thank the good Lord that you are alive and able to look at his wonderful world,” she told NPR in 2023.
Smith’s husband of 73 years, Henry, died in 2013. She is survived by a daughter, Alice.
An earlier version of this story misstated the first name of Edith Renfrow Smith’s husband.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
