Rocky Mount woman turning 106 shares experience overcoming Great Depression, segregation

Pauline Lawrence overcame the Great Depression, segregation and a family legacy of suffering to build her family from the ground up — giving them a world of opportunities she could never reach.

Lawrence was born in the Battleboro community north of Rocky Mount in 1916. Her parents died when she was a teenager, leaving her to raise seven siblings by herself at the onset of the Great Depression.

“I didn’t know how, but I cooked enough for them to live off,” Lawrence said.

By day, she worked on farmland in Battleboro, harvesting sweet potatoes and tobacco. At night, she cleaned houses for white families in town.

“What could you do about it?” Lawrence said. “Nothing but go to work wherever they said and do it.”

Lawrence’s grandparents were enslaved on the same land she grew up working.

Her husband’s parents were born into slavery in Battleboro, and Lawrence’s daughter struggled for years with the stories her grandmother would tell of her childhood spent in chains.

“She used to see how they would get tortured, mistreated,” Patricia Battle said. “But being a child, there was nothing they could do about it but accept it and pray that one day they would come out of it.”

Prayer is what Lawrence leaned on too through decades of segregation.

She had 10 children. and as the years passed and schools for Black students improved, Lawrence made sure that all of them followed through with their education.

“You’ve got an opportunity, and she always told us, don’t let anybody take that opportunity from you,” Battle said.

Time has taken its toll, and some memories escape her.

Lawrence now struggles to hold a conversation.

But in a few weeks, the family she built from the ground up will come together once again to celebrate how far they’ve come.

“You know God was in front of all of it, or I couldn’t have done it,” Lawrence said.

Pauline Lawrence will celebrate her 106th birthday in September.