Thelma Strother may have lived all her life within the 12 square miles of Lexington, but she has inhabited multiple worlds during her century in town.
Strother was born in 1919 in a house on Old Cherokee Road, a wooden cabin with no indoor plumbing, at a time when Lexington had fewer than 900 residents. As a young girl, she walked to school and rode in a wagon to go to church or buy groceries.
She went to primary and secondary school at the Rosenwald school in Lexington, among the state-of-the-art educational facilities for Black students in the segregated South. The school was built in 1928-29, through the Rosenwald schools program, and drew students from towns miles away such as Pelion, Gilbert and Irmo…